Not PC

. . . promoting capitalist acts between consenting adults.

Friday, November 10, 2006

Beer O’Clock – Emerson’s APA

More talk about weather and beer from Neil at Real Beer, the leading online source for beer information in New Zealand. Some cities have climate. Wellington has weather, but they do have Emerson's American Pale Ale ...

I love spring time in Wellington. The gentle zephyr blowing by at 93km/h, 9 whole degrees at lunchtime and the gentle hum of hail bouncing off the roof…

This kind of wrecked my plan to talk about good barbeque beers.

So I decided instead to talk about a beer which comes out every spring – Emerson’s American Pale Ale.

Brewer Richard Emerson was inspired to make this beer by a 2002 trip to Oregon in the United States where he tasted first hand their insanely hopped American Pale Ales. These were beers you could smell from literally across the room. He liked them.

APA is (logically enough) the US interpretation of the English beer style called India Pale Ale. It a robust beer made with pale ale malt and is heavily hopped – usually with American hop varieties. These are often strong and have a pronounced grapefruit character.

Emerson’s APA was first made for the festive brew contest at Brew NZ in 2004. It won both the judging and the people’s choice in its category and has appeared every October since.

The beer provided one of my favourite quotes from Richard: “It’s extremely expensive to make. But why not put lots of hops in? We’re brewers, not accountants.”

Hear, hear. APA contains a number of American hops including Cascade and Amarillo.

It pours an inviting cloudy copper/orange. The nose is big with plenty of spicy and fruity aromas - particularly grapefruit and pine - dancing above the glass.

It’s full-bodied and biscuity with lashings of citrus and grapefruit followed by a dry, resinous finish which is nicely in balance.

It’s not as wild and raw as it used to be. Some people find it a lot more approachable. I guess I kind of miss the crazy beer I first met in 2004.

That said, it’s one of the ten best New Zealand beers on offer this year (again) and is an absolute stunner!

New Zealand mountaineer Mark Inglis is the focus of a Discovery Channel documentary set to start screening in the United States.The documentary, by filmmaker Dick Colthurst, tells the story of Inglis' becoming the first double amputee to summit Everest, on carbon-fibre legs with spiked feet. The TV series, Everest: Beyond the Limit, shows Inglis inching upward on his spindly black prosthetics, blood from his raw-rubbed stumps staining the snow. "It's hard to know whether to feel inspired by his guts or infuriated at his foolhardiness," said a report on the documentary in the Chicago Tribune.

Auckland's RWC Stadium: Another pitch for Carlaw Park

We will today be told by our betters where they intend to spend our money on a stadium for Rugby World Cup 2011. The signals given by the politicians -- 'signals' being all we peasants deserve at this stage -- suggest that the bedpan on the waterfront is the preferred option. What a nonsense.

Said Geoff Vazey of Ports of Auckland about a waterfront stadium:

it simply cannot be constructed in time. He says the risks of pushing it through would be overwhelming.

He says before any land could be set aside for a stadium, the port would need an alternative site to conduct its business and it would be 2009 before building could even start.

And Sky Tower architect Gordon Moller said "it would wreck the waterfront." He's right. And Institute of Architects president Ian Athfield says it is is "important it fitted into its environment." That can't be done if it's put between city and harbour.

I still maintain that if you're going to spend this much of our money -- about a thousand dollars per taxpayer -- then we're entitled to have a say in what's going on. I don't think that's unreasonable. And I still maintain that of the options we know about, the Carlaw Park option is by far the best. (Pictured above is just one quickly-sketched example of what might be done there, and how it might appear from Grafton Gulley. )

Done right, a new stadium should enhance the city on a much wider scale than just its immediate location, and a good Carlaw Park stadium offers the following benefits and opportunities which are good for both the stadium, for its surrounds, and for the long-term benefit of the city (you can see at the top of the page and just below an example of how it might be done):

there is immediate access to motorways north, south and west, with ample provision for parking under the stadium

immediate access also to rail lines north and south, with stations developed as part of the stadium, and an easy walk to a Kingdon St station for trains heading west -- all up easily twice the capacity of Britomart can be added with ease

the stadium can be accessed on up to three sides through large concourses, as shown in the plan above

few noise or residential problems

superb views from the stadium itself out to the city, to Rangitoto and the inner harbour -- a great advertisement to broadcast to the world

opportunity to link domain, Stanley St Tennis, new Stanley Circus precinct, and new Vector Arena into one sports and entertainment precinct -- an exciting new part of the city

the Carlaw Park site is already in a natural bowl, so there is no blocking of existing views, and it offers the opportunity to produce something spectacular rather than something that needs to be hidden

there is an opportunity to enhance and develop all areas around the stadium to the long-term benefit of the city: the university edge; the 'armpit' of Grafton Gully, which with the development of a new 'Stanley Circus Precinct' makes this a destination rather than an eyesore; the 'backside' of Parnell, which by linking up with the domain makes this area the 'front lawn' of Parnell

opening up Parnell to the domain by bridging the rail line, and developing domain-edge cafes

opens up the university to the domain, and to domain-edge cafes, and brings the lower domain back to the city by making it more easily accessible

linking Parnell and the city through the stadium by bridging the rail line, offering a new footbridge and stadium access

introduction of a travellator in existing tunnels under Albert Park and Constitution Hill from the end of the footbridge to Victoria St, in the heart of the city, works for both easy game-day stadium access and, with the addition of ample under-stadium parking, allows for easy everyday 'park-and-slide' access to and from the city right at the foot of a convenient motorway connection

a city stadium, rather than a suburban one, offers all the pre- and after-match pleasures pleasures we already associate with the already successful Cake Tin in Wellington -- pleasures which would be made even more local by development of a new Stanley Street Circus Precinct, and enhancement of the links to Parnell and city as described.

As I've suggested before, despite the history of Eden Park it's time to recognise that as a severely constricted suburban stadium it no longer fits the needs of a world-class city. Other cities have realised when it's time to let historic stadiums go in order to create something truly worthwhile in a better location. Time to bite the bullet and use its assets as financial fertiliser for something truly world class that enhances the city for the long term. Carlaw Park is the place for that, not the waterfront -- a waterfront stadium is a short-term solution with too many attendant and expensive difficulties.

If that is given as today's answer, which we all now expect to the case, then the wrong questions are being asked. And whichever location is chosen, there is still time, albeit briefly, for a competition to choose a design. This is too important, and too bloody expensive, to rely simply on the closed group of designers presently being talked about behind closed doors.

UPDATE 1: Cullen's comments yesterday about the stadium decision provide some of the only details to date that anyone outside the elect has to go on. Says the Herald, "He dismissed the Carlaw Park option as affecting the Domain..." I think it's clear enough from what I've shown above that any affect on the Domain can only be positive. Maybe that's why it's being dismissed?

UPDATE 2:David Farrar highlights the problems with the decision-making-by-Nomenklatura currently being imposed on us. As he says, given the secrecy and he attendant concerns, "the potential for disaster seems high."

I think about this stadium proposal, developed in secret by politicans, and look at what is missing:

* There is no agreement with the sporting codes on whether they would use the stadium* There is no agreement with the local authorities* There is no agreement with the owners of the land* The exact location seems to change by the day* There is no owner (such as the Trust in Wgtn) and manager for the stadium!!* There is no agreement on who will pay* There are no sponsors* There are no planning consents

As far as I can tell, and I await the official announcement, every single pillar necessary for a sound decision is absent.

United Future Peter Dunne said today he was "seriously alarmed at what is looming as a complete shambles over the location and funding of the new national stadium."

No one knew who the experts were the Government kept referring to and many people who should have been consulted had not.

And Keith had this to say about the notion of the waterfront bedpan:

We do have concerns... that it might end up like a blot on the seascape and undermine the good work that's been done along the Auckland waterfront to make it more people-friendly...

And, gosh-darn it, both Dunne and Locke are right -- and given that under normal circumstances both would be needed to vote for the Clark Government's solution, it would suggest McCully has already sold out on behalf of his party.

Parnell Mainstreet Inc, Newmarket Business Association, Parnell Community Committee and Friends of the Domain believe rebuilding Carlaw Park is a better option. "We've got an existing derelict downtown venue, a landowner that hasn't ruled such a proposition out, and the ability to claim a fraction of the Domain for public use.

"So as far as we're concerned it's a no-brainer," groups spokesman Cameron Brewer said. "It's in a natural amphitheatre, a motorway runs to it and the main trunk line runs past it. "It has all the CBD advantages the Bledisloe option has. In fact it's better because it's even more strategically located and is not to be a 35-metre high giant box on the water's edge."

Newmarket Business Association spokesman Cameron Brewer said the Government should reconsider redeveloping Auckland's Carlaw Park, which was located at the bottom of the city's domain. A proposal three years ago put a $100 million pricetag on building a 25,000 seat stadium there. A 60,000 seat stadium would cost more, but significantly less than the $700,000 touted for the waterfront.

UPDATE 6: (2:25pm)It's the Bedpan: And now they "want your say." They say. From the Herald report:

The Government said today it strongly prefers a new $500 million-plus stadium on the Auckland waterfront for the 2011 Rugby World Cup.But Sports Minister Trevor Mallard has also called on Aucklanders to give it a clear indication whether the city wants a new stadium or whether Eden Park should be upgraded.

The preferred waterfront site is over Marsden Wharf between Captain Cook and Bledisloe wharves

The Government has been advised by a technical panel led by Ken Harris the chief executive of Wellington's port [my emphasis]

[They want] building work on the stadium underway by December 2007 and are prepared to rewrite various laws to clear the way for the development.

...architects Warren and Mahoney ... envisage a translucent 37 metre-tall structure, similar to the Allianz Stadium bult in Munich, Germany, for this year's soccer World Cup (ie., the bedpan).

...the Eden Park Trust Board has an assessment from its own quantity surveyors that says a new waterfront stadium could cost more than $1 billion...

Mr Mallard wants Aucklanders and local bodies to have their say on which [of either Eden park or bedpan] they prefer within two weeks...

Mini-tutorial: Colour - Michael Newberry

Here's another mini-tutorial from artist Michael Newberry, this time on the Integration of Colour, using as his 'model' his own painting Counterpose, from 1990 (above). He begins:

In the tutorial, Integration of Light, I mentioned that the theme of Counterpose is about a harmony of contrast. I showed how I painted extreme contrasts in light and dark. In this tutorial I am showing how, keeping to the theme of contrast, I painted extremes of color contrasts...

Thursday, November 09, 2006

'Don't Vote' was the winner on the night

(CBS 42) A preliminary analysis of voter turnout across the U.S. was higher than expected.

More than 40-percent of voters came to the polls, according to the Center for the Study of the American Electorate.

Which means, I guess, that just like the British elections last year the winner on the night was the 'Don't Vote, Don't Encourage Them' party, with fully-sixty percent of prospective electors supporting them. Won't stop them all claiming a "mandate" to speak on everyone else's behalf, though will it?

Today I figured readers might like to see some, just some, of the fatuous environmental predictions made by worry-worts and misanthropic headline-hunting doomsayers.

Britain's industrial growth will come to a halt because its coal reserves are running out “… it is useless to think of substituting any other kind of fuel for coal... some day our coal seams [may] be found emptied to the bottom, and swept clean like a coal-cellar. Our fires and furnaces ... suddenly extinguished, and cold and darkness ... left to reign over a depopulated country." --Economist William Stanley Jevons, writing in 1865

Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions....By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine. --Peter Gunter, a professor at NorthTexasStateUniversity. Spring 1970 issue of ‘The Living Wilderness.’

…some scientists estimate that the world's known supplies of oil, tin, copper, and aluminium will be used up within your lifetime. --1990s school textbook The United States and Its People, quoted by Ronald Bailey in testimony to US House Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources, Feb 4, 2004

The period of global food security is over. As the demand for food continues to press against supply, inevitably real food prices will rise. The question no longer seems to be whether they will rise, but how much. --Worldwatch Institute founder Lester Brown, 1981

The world's farmers can no longer be counted on to feed the projected additions to the world's population.-- Worldwatch Institute founder Lester Brown, State of the World Report, 1994

The continued rapid cooling of the earth since WWII is in accord with the increase in global air pollution associated with industrialization, mechanization, urbanization and exploding population. —Reid Bryson, “Global Ecology; Readings towards a rational strategy for Man”, (1971)

The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines. Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. Population control is the only answer. —Paul Ehrlich, in The Population Bomb(Ballantine Books 1968)

I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000. —Paul Ehrlich in (1969)

In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.—Paul Ehrlich, Earth Day (1970)

Before 1985, mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity…in which the accessible supplies of many key minerals will be facing depletion. —Paul Ehrlich in (1976)

There are ominous signs that the earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production—with serious political implications for just about every nation on earth. The drop in food production could begin quite soon… The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologist are hard-pressed to keep up with it…This [cooling] trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. --Science writer Peter Gwynne writing in ‘The Cooling World,’ ‘Newsweek’ magazine, April 28, 1975

This cooling has already killed hundreds of thousands of people. If it continues and no strong action is taken, it will cause world famine, world chaos and world war, and this could all come about before the year 2000. —Lowell Ponte in his book The Cooling, 1976 (which was endorsed by US Senator Claiborne Pell and current Bush adviser on global warming Stephen Schneider)

If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder by the year 2000. … This is about twice what it would take to put us in an ice age. —Kenneth E.F. Watt on air pollution and global cooling, speaking on Earth Day 1970.Watt is Editor in Chief, Encyclopedia of Human Ecology Advisory Board Member, Center for the Study of CO2 and Climate Change

Indeed, when we wake up 20 years from now and find that the Atlantic Ocean is just outside Washington, D.C., because the polar icecaps are melting, we may look back at this pivotal election. --New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman, writing in NY Times, Dec 8, 2000.

Frostban -- a harmless bacteria genetically engineered to protect plants from freezing temperatures -- "could irreversibly affect worldwide climate and precipitation patterns over a long, long period of time. -- Founder and president of the Foundation on Economic Trends, Jeremy Rifkin, 1986

The economic impact of BIV (Bovine Immunodeficiency Virus) on the beef and dairy industries is likely to be devastating in the years to come. --Jeremy Rifkin, Beyond Beef 1992

Biotech crops will "run amok"; they will create "super bugs"; they will lead to farmers using "greater quantities of herbicides." --Jeremy Rifkin, 1999 Boston Globe

The use of biotechnology might "risk a fatal interruption of millions of years of evolutionary development? Might not the artificial creation of life spell the end of the natural world? ... cause irreversible damage to the biosphere, making genetic pollution an even greater threat to the planet than nuclear or petrochemical pollution?” -- Jeremy Rifkin, The Biotech Century 1999

Current estimates that a flu pandemic could infect 20% of the world's population and cause 7.5 million deaths are "among the more optimistic predictions of how the next pandemic might unfold.” --Osterhaus et al. Nature May 2005

The next flu pandemic could kill as many as 150 million people. --Dr. David Nabarro. WHO spokesman Sept 2005.

As many as 142 million people around the world could die if bird flu turns into a "worst case" influenza pandemic and global economic losses could run to $4.4 trillion - the equivalent of wiping out the entire Japanese economy for a year. --Report entitled Global Macroeconomic Consequences of Pandemic Influenza, from the Lowy Institute in Australia. Feb 2006.

112 MPs vote for 120 MPs

What better day for turkeys to refuse to vote for Christmas than one in which the high-profile drinking-age bill was debated, and the higher-profile US elections were held. With those two headline-hogging happenings happening, who would have noticed that one of the most overwhelming votes for a political measure by electors was given the big two fingers by those they elect?

Yep, despite an overwhelming 81.5 percent of voters declaring in a nationwide referendum that they wanted fewer MPs rather than more, said MPs have said, "We know best," and thrown out Barbara Stewart's bill to cut the number of Beehive bludgers by twenty. "Mrs Stewart says it is ironic that MPs are quick to implement the will of the people on election day when it suits them but have cast aside a referendum which had the support of over 80 percent of voters." But "opponents of the bill said a drop in numbers would mean less diversity in terms of race, gender and sexual orientation." [Insert appropriate expressions of opprobrium here.]

My congratulations to the nine MPs honest enough to vote the way their employers had instructed them to.

NCEA: SHID*

Students will be able to use text abbreviations in this year's exams, the New Zealand Qualifications Authority (NZQA) has said.Bali Haque, NZQA deputy chief executive of qualifications, said credit would be given in this year's NCEA (National Certificate of Educational Achievement) exams if the answer showed the required understanding

To be frank, why don't we just abandon any pretence that the state's factory schools are there to teach, or that the NCEA system is intended to encourage excellence and to kickstart careers.

Far more honest, surely to simply accept that the factory schools are simply there to turn minds to mush, to promote "desired social ends," to create a broadly compliant underclass, and to keep the braindead off the streets.

Wednesday, November 08, 2006

Sense from Parliament

Some sense from Parliament tonight:

Strong vote against raising drinking ageThe bill to revert the liquor buying age to 20 has been soundly defeated by MPs in a conscience vote. After weeks of lobbying and debate, MPs voted 72 to 49 to kill the Sale of Liquor (Youth Alcohol Harm Reduction) Amendment Bill on its second reading.

Congratulations to all the campaigners advocating that adults are treated as adults.

UPDATE:The Herald has the list of 72 MPs who voted for personal responsibility last night, and also the 49 Nannies. (And I note that Richard Worth has been promoted by the Herald to be MP for Epsom.)

Should adults be allowed to drink?

I could write another pithy post on how wrong it would be to ban eighteen- and nineteen- year-old drinkers from pubs, but since the good Dr Goode from the Libertarianz has already said every thing I'd want to say, I'll point you to what he's said.

"Should adults be allowed to drink," he asks. And that's the whole question really, isn't it -- and when put that way, the answer is fairly obvious. Of course adults should be, and if they don't think adults are up to it then let's see them either take all rights away from adults as well, or all adult rights away from all eighteen and nineteen year-olds. Let's see them also vote to raise the driving age, the voting age, the marrying age, the age of consent, and the age for joining the military-- in short, the age for taking responsibility for our own lives since the clear view expressed in a negative vote will be that no eighteen and nineteen year-old is mature enough to think for themselves.

But when would these politicians consider anyone is mature enough to get our from under Nanny's skirts? Perhaps they should just raise the drinking age to forty-one and have done with it altogether?

Why freedom? What freedom?

"...the deification of property rights and markets, rather than a recognition that they are simply a useful tool and therefore can be changed depending on the desired social end"

"... [our] monomaniacal fixation on the state as the sole limitation on liberty"

"... the hypocrisy of many libertarians who proclaim the sanctity of absolutist property rights while opposing even token restitution by the government towards the descendents of this country's original indigenous owners... What [we]’re really advocating is ‘start from now’ libertarianism which, funnily enough, almost-always finds its strongest advocates amongst those who are doing pretty well at present thank you very much."

I'll only reply briefly, since these represent two errors and one straw men that have been dealt with at length before.

Property rights are a subset of rights, but just as only ghosts are able to live without property (as Ayn Rand noted) so too it is property rights that make all other rights possible ("without property rights," said Rand, "no other rights are possible.") They represent an integration of real ethical-legal principles, not a nominalist fiction, and are not confined only to property in land but to all the property we have in the values we ourselves create. They are a recognition that unlike other animals our human means of survival is our minds; specifically our minds put to use to reshape the things in the world into a form in which they can further our life – in a form in which they we make them valuable to us. This is the fundamental difference between ourselves and other animals: unlike them we have to produce the things we need in order to survive and to flourish – we must produce our own values -- and we must use our minds to guide us in what we produce, and how we may produce it. We must identify our values, produce them ourselves and, in order to plan long-range (the distinctive human mode of existence), we must be able to have long-range protection for those values we've produced for our survival. That long-range protection of the values we ourselves have created is what property rights represent.

Markets are simply the sum of voluntary choices taken by individuals seeking to better themselves. Those individuals might be wrong in the choices they make -- such as commissioning Frank Gehry or buying Jackson Pollock paintings for example -- but they are their choices to make, not yours or mine, since it is the values they themselves have produced that they are seeking to trade. Markets reflect the truth that voluntary interaction reflects a harmony of interests that is both benevolent and beneficial, the 'miracle' of Adam Smith's invisible hand that is no less a miracle for being explicable.

Freedom is not the absence of want, but freedom from physical coercion. Rights themselves may not be removed except by physical force; whenever a man is made to act against his voluntary consent, his right has been violated. Misunderstand this point -- of what freedom actually constitutes -- and you find that the incorrect view of freedom (absence of want) wipes out the true one, in which all human interaction can be voluntary rather than coercive -- a point reflected in the basis for libertarianism being viewed by many libertarians as 'voluntarism.' The chief problem with positing freedom as something different to this, as for example some variant of 'freedom from want,' is that reality itself provides no guarantees on that score, and the state is in no position to fake reality any more than you or I or Jacques Derrida. What the state does have unique to itself however is a legal monopoly on the use of force. It has power. Freedom is better than power. If providing 'freedom from want' is considered to be the state's job, then coercing those who provide the means of life is what the state is required to do, and (as history shows) there goes that whole voluntary interaction deal...

Libertarianz supports the right of anyone at all, regardless of colour, to front up seeking a court's recognition of and protection for their rights in common law, meeting the legal standard of proof for such things. I refer you, for example, to the Libertarianz submission on the Foreshore and Seabed Act. What we do not support however is a racially-based welfare system or an indigenous state gravy train. Make of that what you will.

I'd like in conclusion to just point out to both Terence and Idiot Savant that I am not a Nozickian, and I know no libertarians outside academia who are. There is a reason that Nozick is popular in university politics departments, and it's not because he provides robust arguments for liberty. Quite the opposite. As I've said here before:

Nozick is considered by academics to be the leading advocate for libertarianism and freedom amongst modern political philosophers, but his weak arguments are too easily trumped by self-serving intellectuals who only feel obliged to answer Nozick, rather than more substantial political thinkers like Rand....

But perhaps it is the very weakness of his arguments that add to his attraction, he is the ideal libertarian straw man - easy to knock down, and to burn while he's down.

But Nozick does have value. He shows us that if your arguments lack foundations you will undo your conclusions, no matter how true they might be.

A more robust libertarianism can be seen in my own Cue Card Libertarianism, a work still in progress, and to which I've provided some relevant links above.

What's with the 'we,' Brian?

Two good posts from Rodney Hide in the last two days criticising Bryan Gould (far left), erstwhile leader of the British Labour Party and now the self-important vice-chancellor of the University of Political Correctness in the Waikato.Gould expressed the view that “We” should control our own economic destiny, not foreign executives in a globalised world, to which Rodney replied (in part):

Given the choice between having someone else control your destiny, or for you to control it yourself, the answer is simple. We want control for ourselves.

But that’s not the choice that Mr Gould is referring to. He fudges the real choice he’s presenting. It’s easy to see why.

The real choice is about people making choices themselves in a free market versus government making choices for us. For Mr Gould the “We” he refers to is government. But what puts us most in control of our own destiny? We as individuals deciding how to spend our own money or governments doing it for us? Whenever you hear socialists speak of “we” be afraid. Be Very Afraid.

Too true. A respondent however criticised this response in these terms:

The political debate is now shaped and constrained in the interests of a small, self-interested and ideologically unrepresentative group of immensely powerful investors who could never have secured support for their extreme positions if they had had to seek a democratic mandate.

"But just how powerful are these investors?" responds Rodney far more politely than I might have, offering four points in response. "First, they only have money to invest if savers provide them with their money, i.e. they have to satisfy their customers. They have no power to make people invest with them—it’s all voluntary. Second..."

Stadium decision-making is management by blundering around

G-Man notes that the high-handed and secretive decision-making over the Rugby stadium for the 2011 World Cup is "further proof thathe only difference between the bigspending socialists in Labour and the bigspending socialists in National is purely in the semantics and the rhetoric."

Ever felt like a mushroom? Fed bullshit and kept in the dark? Welcome to decision-making by government without the people, paid for by the people, over the people. As G-Man summarises, the only apparent problem either Clark, McCully or Mallard have is whether or not they can spend our money in time.

US mid-term elections: A house divided?

With US now at the polls in the mid-tem elections, I'm reposting FWIW my own voting guide posted here a fortnight or so ago.

* * * * *

One of the beauties of the American system of government is the check on power created by enabling the executive and both houses of the legislature to be controlled by different parties. Which lovers of small government, for example, cannot recall with a smile the shut-down of government that happened under the fortuitous combination of a Democratic Clinton Administration and a Republican House?

This is just a prelude really to saying that all things being equal I prefer to see power divided, rather than having all elected arms of government in the hands of the same party, and so just on that basis alone would not be unhappy to see the Democrats take control of either the Senate or the House of Representatives. On top of that, and given the disgraceful statism in recent years of the conservative side of the aisle (examined in some detail in this series here), it's hard to see that the Democrats could do a worse job.

How you cast your vote in the coming election is important, even if the two parties are both rotten. In essence, the Democrats stand for socialism, or at least some ambling steps in its direction; the Republicans stand for religion, particularly evangelical Christianity, and are taking ambitious strides to give it political power.

Socialism—a fad of the last few centuries—has had its day; it has been almost universally rejected for decades... Religion, by contrast—the destroyer of man since time immemorial—is not fading; on the contrary, it is now the only philosophic movement rapidly and righteously rising to take over the government.

Given the choice between a rotten, enfeebled, despairing killer, and a rotten, ever stronger, and ambitious killer, it is immoral to vote for the latter, and equally immoral to refrain from voting at all because “both are bad.”

[...] What does determine the survival of this country is not political concretes, but fundamental philosophy. And in this area the only real threat to the country now, the only political evil comparable to or even greater than the threat once posed by Soviet Communism, is religion and the Party which is its home and sponsor.

The most urgent political task now is to topple the Republicans from power, if possible in the House and the Senate. This entails voting consistently Democratic, even if the opponent is a “good” Republican.

"The results of surveying 32 European countries, the US and Japan reveals "that only Turkey is less willing than the US to accept evolution as fact." You might view it as a 'sanity ranking.' Said the study's author of the US's position:

American Protestantism is more fundamentalist than anybody except perhaps the Islamic fundamentalists, which is why Turkey and we are so close.

Worrying news.

However, Objectivist writer Robert Tracinski disagrees with Peikoff's thesis. Unsatisfied as he is (and I am) with the Republican Congress and with the apparent rise of the supernaturally challenged, he still suggest the best result is a "humiliating defeat" for the Democrats. "The best thing we can do in this election is to crush the left," he says, "because the Democratic Party adds nothing of value to the American political debate." All the important debates are now happening on the right, he argues, and so "the more the left fades from the scene, the more the national political debate will be a debate within the right."

It sounds a little Pollyanna-ish to me. He does however allow:

In the American system, of course, we don't vote for parties but for individual candidates. So if your local congressional candidate has championed a particularly evil political agenda, is under indictment, or is named "Katherine Harris," then by all means vote for the other guy.

Good advice in any election.

UPDATE 1: Even as I was writing this Mike Mazza was writing an almost identical post with even the same linked articles over at SOLO, where a healthy debate has ensued: Election '06 - SOLO.

UPDATE 3:Fox News reports that "libertarians — people who cringe at intrusive government, high taxes, nation-building and politicians telling them how to behave — could turn out to be the key swing voters in Tuesday's contentious midterm election."

An architecture quiz

What is this a picture of?

a) A useless pile of trash.b) A model for a US$127 million piece of trash.c) A Rorshach test for pretentious poseurs.d) A new creation by Weta Workshops for Alien Ve) A new museum for Louis Vuitton in Paris.f) All but one of the above.

Brian wished to open a thread on which to argue directly his claims for the Many World Interpretation. This is that thread. The following is Brian's opening salvo.

The Many Worlds Interpretation is the claim that Quantum Mechanics is a true description of reality and that this description applies at all scales, from the microscopic to the macroscopic. It is the claim that not only atoms are subject to quantum phenomena but also observers such as you and me. Taken seriously, the Many Worlds Interpretation implies that physical reality is a vastly bigger thing than we perceive and that reality is partitioned into entities that to a very good approximation are classical universes identical to ours. In the Many Worlds Interpretation, other universes exist and affect each other and we can observe the results of this experimentally - for example when we carry out interference experiments.

The entire ensemble of universes in the Many Worlds Interpretation is contained in an entity called the 'multiverse.' Each universe in this multiverse obeys exactly the same laws of physics and there is an infinity of universes. Universes differ in how events turn out. When two previously identical universes become different because events turn out differently we say the universes have differentiated. The multiplicity of each identical universe in the multiverse is infinite. We can speak of the measure of each universe. Basically it is the relative proportion of one set of identical universes with respect to another set of identical universes. Measure is an important concept in the Many Worlds Interpretation - it means that things do not turn out equally. It means that our choices in the multiverse are important because they govern the future measure of ourselves. And it means that we need not be concerned about the possibility of giant Sperm Whales appearing in orbit around the Earth.

The original version of the Many Worlds Interpretation was put forward by Hugh Everett III in 1957. In its original conception, universes did not differentiate, they split. This creates a number of problems with measure and also in reconciling the MWI with existing physical law. For these reasons the idea of splitting was dropped and replaced with the idea of differentiation by freedomist physicist David Deutsch. It was Deutsch's interest in the Many World Interpretation that led him to discover the almost thaumaturgical possibility of a universal quantum computer, laying the foundation for the modern field of quantum information theory. Universal quantum computers are probably just years away from realisation.

Peter has asked "why the Many Worlds Interpretation is a meaningful physical explanation and not just a useful concept or method". My outline above hints at some reasons. In the equations of Quantum Mechanics we have a tool that describes and predicts our observations in precise detail. We are entitled, therefore, to regard these equations as telling us something about the nature of reality for where does that predictive power come from if the equations do not reflect truths about reality? When the mathematics of quantum mechanics tell us that a quantum computer can perform prodigious feats of calculation in real time by differentiating into, say, 10^1000 versions of itself, then what are we to conclude? That those 10^1000 versions are just mathematical conveniences? How are we to explain the calculation when the entire observable universe contains just 10^80 atoms?

But we don't need complicated mathematics to tell us multiple universes exist. We can infer it from a purely non-mathematical, physical argument, as David Deutsch does in Chapters 2 and 9 of his book The Fabric of Reality when he considers various single-photon interference experiments (see also this video).

Another reason to regard the Many Worlds Interpretation as an explanation is that we have begun to elucidate in detail the structure of the multiverse and how it is determined by information flow (the multiverse is rather more than just an ensemble of universes!). If the multiverse were not real, it seems inconceivable that we could do this. Furthermore, the Many World Interpretation can be used to derive the Born probability rule of Quantum Mechanics. If correct, then even this in itself indicates that the Many World Interpretation has deep explanatory power for previously the Born rule had to be assumed.

A popular criticism of the Many Worlds Interpretation is that we cannot see or communicate with other universes. We can only infer the existence of other universes from things seen in this universe. The reason for this is that interference occurs when universes that had become different become identical again. The more different the two universes have become the more unusual it is for them to come together again - although this is happening all the time. Controlling interference between two universes requires that we control all the particles that have different states in the two universes and for practical purpose this means that we can control interference only in universes that are very nearly identical. For you to communicate with your doppelgänger would require controlling an astronomical number of particles, including all those in your brain. This is not even a remote possibility. That we infer the existence of other universes indirectly should be no more controversial than that we infer the existence of, say, neutrinos indirectly. We can't be absolutely sure that neutrinos really exist, but the concept provides the best explanation for things we do observe.

Another popular criticism of the Many Worlds Interpretation is that it cannot be distinguished from the philosophically lameCopenhagen Interpretation, which is another popular scientific explanation for the observations of quantum experiments. But the criticism may not stand. David Deutsch proposed the first test to distinguish the Many World Interpretation from the Copenhagen Interpretation in 1977 (see Quantum Concepts of Space and Time, Oxford: The Clarendon Press, pp. 204-214) and there have been a number of other proposals put forward since then. Unfortunately these are not yet technically feasible (and some may be conceptually wrong), but we should not be surprised that the Many World Interpretation makes different predictions to its rivals for it has different assumptions.

I'll quickly summarise some other reasons why you should regard the Many Worlds Interpretation as an explanation. In the Many World Interpretation, a particle is a particle; it is not both localized at a point and spread out over the whole universe. Explanations that invoke the latter idea have only ever caused confusion! The Many Worlds Interpretation does not require "spooky action at a distance" or that, in Einstein's words, "God plays dice." Quantum mechanics turns out to be, after all, local and deterministic, as all good explanations are. In the Many World Interpretation, reality exists independently of consciousness and although we are differentiating into countless versions all the time we can reconcile this with identity and free will. Finally - as implied by the other points - the Many Worlds Interpretation requires no collapse of the wave function (the wave function doesn't even seem to collapse in the Many World Interpretation) so this postulate can be dropped from quantum mechanics and Ockham's Razor slices in favour of the Many Worlds Interpretation.

The Many Worlds Interpretation is not without possible non-trivial problems. But these problems are not obvious objections stemming from incredulity to the whole idea of multiple universes, they are technical problems (and some [pdf] may already have been resolved). The Many World Interpretation has matured [pdf] in the last two decades and many critics have not caught up. We need to think what it would mean if the Many Worlds Interpretation were true, for so far it is our only tenable explanation of the strange quantum reality that we observe.

A billion dollar bedpan?

Who on earth would want this on the Auckland waterfront?

Not Gordon Moller, who knows a thing or two about architecture. Not Geoff Vazey of Ports of Auckland, whose wharf it is that the Clark Government have been trying to usurp. Not taxpayers, surely, who will be feeling the government's hand in their pocket to the tune of $1,000 each to pay for it. And not me.

If taxpayers really have to be dunned to pay for this or something like it, and wherever it ends up going (and I have to say I still favour Carlaw Park myself), why not have a competition to design something of some worth instead of a bedpan.

Everybody knows that the war is over Everybody knows the good guys lost

Everybody knows it, so it must be true, mustn't it? Well, guess what. In fact, don't guess, have a look at that graph below, based on data from National Tidal Facility, Adelaide, who confirm that "there has been no significant rise in sea level in Tuvalu over the past 22 years."

The reported `plight' of the Tuvaluans is not about sea level rise at all - it's about over-population. With such a high population density, the fresh water table on the atolls is subject to rapid depletion, especially in dry years. In addition, the development which would follow from such a high density will bring the inevitable coastal erosion, a problem which the Tuvalu government falsely blames on climate change and sea level rise. Tide gauge data from all around the South Pacific shows the same pattern as the one at Funafuti - no sea level rise. It is, and always was, a bogus claim, with few in the outside world bothering to check the accuracy of the claim.

"I always say the issue is a god-send for politicians. It's fantastic to say we are saving the planet but they will never be held to account in 30 to 50 years time. I call it a very convenient diversion for them." He said the evidence was not overwhelming. "This is one of the biggest myths or lies. It is not certain at all. We want evidence, very simply. "I give lots of lectures and I always say climate change and sea-level change only happen in computer models. Time and again, if one checks the real world against what I call the virtual world, they don't stack up at all." Insulting the [Climate Science] Coalition's views was the easy way out and avoided the debate, he said.

Last week, Gordon Brown and his chief economist both said global warming was the worst "market failure" ever. That loaded soundbite suggests that the "climate-change" scare is less about saving the planet than, in Jacques Chirac's chilling phrase, "creating world government". This week and next, I'll reveal how politicians, scientists and bureaucrats contrived a threat of Biblical floods, droughts, plagues, and extinctions worthier of St John the Divine than of science.

Sir Nicholas Stern's report on the economics of climate change, which was published last week, says that the debate is over. It isn't. There are more greenhouse gases in the air than there were, so the world should warm a bit, but that's as far as the "consensus" goes.

Read on here for the first of what promises to be two excellent pieces by Monckton on this increasingly topical debate.

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Beer O’Clock – Emerson’s APA
You wouldn't be able to find a larger picture of that beer would you?
Holy moly! You're right Eric - that picture is more aggressive than the APA's hop character.

A great beer but I'm not digging it quite as much this year. Maybe I'm all hopped out. Where are all the subtle and seductive malty ales...? Hmmm... think I'll have an Oatmeal Stout.
Large hops, large pic. That's our policy here. :-)
New Mark Inglis TV
Glad to know that someone other than my best friend agrees with me about Inglis. Hilarly of all people should know that that part of Everest (known as "the Death Zone") is place where at times surviving is all you are capable of.
Go Mark. People just have no idea how narrow the parameters are for that sort of feat. Fifty people walk past the poor chap who died and everyone has a go at the guys with no legs. FFS, as they say on cellphones and in exams.
It is his life but who is picking up the tab Love to know how much the tax payer has invested in this risk taking foolRay
You think he climbed Mount Everest on the sickness benefit?
Auckland's RWC Stadium: Another pitch for Carlaw Park
The problem with carlaw Park is that it is too sensible. If there is a more expensive, wasteful and unworkable option, then that should be pursued at all costs.

- lrfmquxe
P-Style, I think you've hit it on the head.
On the other hand, it would be in my backyard. It seems I might need to become PM in 2008, that appears to be the only way to block a rugby stadion in your backyward.
I think it's a cunning plan. How's this for a conspiracy theory?

Labour know they'll lose the next election. They know the short-sighted public tend to blame the incumbent if anything happens to make them feel bad, no matter the cause.

The stadium won't be finished and transport woes will stop anyone getting to the RWC final. The bedpan will be a billion dollar abortion on international TV during an election year.

National's only hope is to name the stadium after Trevor Mallard.
I am unspeakably furious. I would call the stadium the Arrogant Mallard and Cullen Boondoggle.

They say it was a finely balanced decision - bull shit. It was a done deal a week ago. Where are the public to make submissions over the next two weeks?

Stadium Australia was build by private funds, as I understand. Ihttp://www.telstrastadium.com.au/t is still listed:http://www.asx.com.au/asx/research/CompanyInfoSearchResults.jsp?searchBy=asxCode&allinfo=on&asxCode=SAX

It's a pity we can't convince the Auckland Rugby League or whoever owns Carlaw Park currently to try floating a development of Carlaw Park. Even if they announced it but didn't float, the announcemnt would be a slap in the face to these condescending wankers who wouldn't give us a tax cut but would spend the money on something we wouldn't.

Edit your post and submit it to the Herald PC.
Edit your post and submit it to the Herald PC

Hear Hear!! And the DomPost so you can get everyone down here in Wellington on board, most folks down here don't understabnd why Carlaw park is not a serious contender!
go better pc - you are just the man to start a petition for carlaw park as the place
Or at least start the petition for "Anywhere but Eden park and the waterfront!"
as long as its not lost i dnt care if the rugry world cup aint there as long as it gets done up sooner rather than later.
Mini-tutorial: Colour - Michael Newberry
Well she certainly isn't ugly! Far fropm it. But I'm more interested in the beauty of the mind than the body.

Personally I won't read the article. Not because of a lack of interest. Rather because of the fact that my imagination doesn't work in a way that is very useful for drawing. I cannot visualise. I can create plots and fully detailed characters (I deliberatly use myself as a template for the hero ones) for stories easily, but not visualise. At all (unless it's sex related and even then the background is non-existant).
What a hideous painting!

The clashing colours are just disturbing and the woman's position on the bed is awkward. No sir, I don't like it.
Seconding Blair. The guy has obvious technical skill, and I do kind of like the composition, but the colours are ghastly. Goddamn.

Yours eye-catchingly,Fauve fan (wearing budgie yellow pants, shocking pink shirt, and electric blue tie).
I, like Phil, actually like his choice of colours. I think they offer nice contrast and highlights. And he has good technical ability.
'Don't Vote' was the winner on the night
Doom, gloom and fume"...misanthropic headline-hunting doomsayers"

That's a bit rich after your NCEA post today.
Perhaps you misunderstand the point of this post, Hamish.

I've posted here doomsaying that was both WRONG and MISANTHROPIC.

My post on the NCEA by contrast is posted as another signpost on the road to showing how disastrous the NCE really is, and how destructive to young minds. In other words, following several years of argument on this score, I was posting to who that those predictions were right, and that any misanthropy is on the part of NCEA advocates.
Awfully clever PC. We can all cherry-pick statements throughout history that, added up, give the general effect we seek to project. The original challenge was to provide evidence that the environmental mainstream was motivated by the precepts of 'deep ecology'.

Not to show that people say extreme things that sound silly, and have a laugh.

DenMT
Compared to all that, the Dems in control might not be so bad. Thanks for cheering me up!
denmt, what is more environmental mainstream than quoting text books and books sold by the millions?

It's not that pc quoted from frog blog here.
The quote from a text book was 'some scientists say estimate that the world's known supplies of oil, tin, copper and aluminium will be used up within your lifetime' which sounds alarmist, certainly, but without context is harmless. The majority of these quotes are pretty damn old, and very few of them allude to the deep ecology mindset that PC is so worried by.

I had almost forgotten about this, but fair enough: if you have time and inclination PC, how about finding something to back up your theory that modern-day environmentalism is simply a veneered 'deep ecology'? As a self-proclaimed environmentalist, with plenty of other self-proclaimed environmentalist peers, I am perplexed...

Environmental advocacy is one thing - 'deep ecology' is a convenient moniker used with clear pejorative intent, and meant to discredit people that value the natural environment - who don't necessarily value the ecosphere over humanity, but simply recognise that is HAS value.

I know that you will never recognise intrinsic value in nature PC, and we'll just have to agree to disagree on that one. But to tar all environmentalists with such a broad and clumsy stroke is uncalled for.

DenMT"We can all cherry-pick statements throughout history that, added up, give the general effect we seek to project."

Den, you're beginning to look like a Creationist refusing to countenance the fossil evidence for evolution. "Ah," they say as the fossil evidence keeps piling up, "but you haven't yet got enough evidence to shake my faith..."
Den, I thought you'd conceded the point long ago, way back when those other quotes were first posted, but if you're happy to concede that you and your fellow environmentalists at least don't wish to place human beings below slugs, rocks and mud puddles in the value scale, then I'm happy to admit that not all environmentalism is anti-human.

As I have. Often.

The perfect summation for me of the correct relationship between man and nature is Frank Lloyd Wright's identification of architecture as "that great inclusive agency by which mankind makes human life more natural and nature more humane."

Can we agree on that much?
Den, these proclamations were doubtless taken seriously by people in the past. You can imagine the suitably concerned expressions on the faces of those former news anchors. The end of the world is nigh! Shit! Better regulate!

Presently, Kate Hawkesby, John Campbell & co do exactly the same night after night. Language like 'could', 'perhaps' and 'might' in relation to doomsday is in plentifully sensationalist supply.

And you guys buy it all.
I suspect the truth lies (obviously) not in the supposed "misanthropic ... doomsayers" claims nor PC's seemingly equally vitriolic misanthropic response (no matter how wrong such claims might have turned out, I doubt very much that misanthropy was the motivating factor), but somewhere in the middle.

The reductio of the theory of endless substitution which by inference is the typical position of those in disagreement of the "misanthropists" is that eventually "technology (or some other equally mystical force) will provide" infinite resources for free. (man I can't wait for that day)

It's tempting to assume, given the advances of science and technology over the previous century or so, that technology will (and can) solve all our problems.

This ignores the point that there indeed exists a set of unsolvable problems. The most important and obvious of course being that on a finite planet - exponential population growth is ultimately unsustainable.
Finite planet sure but the consevation of matter and energy principle comes into play,mass energy is never made nor destroyed,just changes into different arrangement of atoms.All the metal ever mined still exists.Sea water alone contains over fifty different elements,including almost all the metals,in the future you may extract copper for example out of sea water.Another term that comes to mind is finite but unbounded ,a good example of something finite but unbounded is the earths spherical shape you can go round and round forever and never fall of the edge of the earth well thats kinda like the situation with resourse extraction,but enviromentalist flat earthers think that we will all collectively fall off the edge and run out of gas,iron, copper or whatever.Recources dont actualy exist as recources at all without the minds capability to conceave of a use and method of extraction for an inanimate object.
Finite planet sure but the consevation of matter and energy principle comes into play,mass energy is never made nor destroyed,just changes into different arrangement of atoms.All the metal ever mined still exists.Sea water alone contains over fifty different elements,including almost all the metals,in the future you may extract copper for example out of sea water.Another term that comes to mind is finite but unbounded ,a good example of something finite but unbounded is the earths spherical shape you can go round and round forever and never fall of the edge of the earth well thats kinda like the situation with resourse extraction,but enviromentalist flat earthers think that we will all collectively fall off the edge and run out of gas,iron, copper or whatever.Recources dont actualy exist as recources at all without the minds capability to conceave of a use and method of extraction for an inanimate object.This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
sushil yadav said...[... blah, blah, blah, blah, ...]

PC, I thought that any poster here have to authenticate him/herself by typing the warped image text to avoid the 'SpamBots' posting spam messages, by auto-authentication. It looks like you have been hit by a spambot.
fossil evidence, yeah right. Shall I pile up the quotes from evolutionists having serious doubt about that fossil evidence pc?
sushil yadav said...[Industrial Society Destroys Mind and Environment.]

Why the f*ck you're using the internet (something pertains ONLY to industrialised society) to make post here. I bet you enjoy that things that is developed & invented by industrialised society.

Here is a simple question. Does the internet (which enable you to make post here), destroy your mind?

Why don't you go to Afganistan and live in a cave with Osama Bin Laden and completely extract yourself from making contact with civilization. No TV, no car, no phone, etc, etc, and of course NO fuckin INTERNET to post to.
Now Class, this is what we call the the Fallacy of the Golden Mean.

Sean.

Steve said... I suspect the truth lies (obviously) not in the supposed "misanthropic ... doomsayers" claims nor PC's seemingly equally vitriolic misanthropic response (no matter how wrong such claims might have turned out, I doubt very much that misanthropy was the motivating factor), but somewhere in the middle.
fossil evidence, yeah right. Shall I pile up the quotes from evolutionists having serious doubt about that fossil evidence pc?"

Go for it Berend....and while you are at it please explain those pesky Dinosaur skeletons that keep being dug up all over the show....when in the last "6'000 years " did God sneak those in without us knowing...?
Michael Fasher - in some senses you are correct however there is this little problem called entropy.

So far we haven't found much of a useful purpose for the CO2 and heat (for example) that is "conserved matter and energy" that results from burning fossil fuels.

You are right - mined metals etc, don't really disappear. I suspect in years to come we will be mining land fill to reclaim alot of the stuff we wasted over the last 100 years.

I think we are living in the best times ever. I suspect things won't get a lot better - sure iPod will come out with a new model, and we might be able to continue to get more obsese and drive around in big fuck off SUVs for another 10, 20 years if we are lucky.

Enjoy the party while the beer is still flowing.
James, need a confirmation from PC that he will my post on the site :-)

As on dinosaurs, I'm not sure what you mean. What's the sneaking? I've always wondered why people in the Middle Ages had pictures of creatures we now clearly identify as dinosaurs.

Obviously if we find a human foot print and a dinosaur foot print together, there is been contamination, because that can't be true.

And isn't it a bit annoying that dinosaur bones smell so strongly after those millions of years of decay? That stretchy tissue has been found in their bones, leading the main researcher to claim she found blood cells. Why not, just been dead for tens of millions of years.
Berend, go right ahead. If they're all as good as your comment here, it should be a laugh-riot:

BEREND: "I've always wondered why people in the Middle Ages had pictures of creatures we now clearly identify as dinosaurs."

:-)
Thanks for the encouragement pc. What's your email or where do I find it so I can email the fossil record quotes post?
ORGANON at IHUG dot CO dot NZ.

But wait until Monday.
Yes, will take some time to assemble all the quotes and check the references.
Sean said... "Now Class, this is what we call the the Fallacy of the Golden Mean."

Sean, to those with more than a lumpen, folk, and/or cursory knowledge of Logic (with a capital L) there is a clear difference between fatuous fuckwittery informed via the juvenille marshalling of informal fallacies against conversational opinion and chat on blog sites and the answering of 1st year philosophy argument and analysis essays. Within which it is clear given your obvious excellence in such subjects, you must have done exceedingly well and we are all very impressed! (hopefully this sufficiently boosts your self-esteem, which if I was a psychologist (which I am not) I would have suspected was the motive behind your comment)

However more to the point, my suggestion was informed by the obvious flaw inherent in either two of the extremes. A subtley which it seems you didn't pick up.

1. The world is going to end sometime next week.

2. The world offers an infinite supply of resources and there are no limits (at all to population growth).

The probabilistic spread of "truthful" possibilities I would have to assume Sean (neither am I a mathematician) must lie somewhere between the two (perhaps not although I guess that would be quite improbable)

However, "class" if you subscribe to either of these two claims (as opposed to some other alternative) you truely are deluded. Hence, "I suspect the truth lies somewhere between the two"

No need to slap me on the wrist with a wet bus ticket for saying "middle" a sop has already done that.

peace and lovesteve

PS: Sean, you are welcome to deduct marks for punctuation and grammar - I haven't proof checked my work.
PS: Sean, you are welcome to deduct marks for punctuation and grammar - I haven't proof checked my work.

LOL! Exactly what I was thinking! Your first sentence alone is so overly complex and unwieldy to leave the question of intellectual errors moot.

Without grammar, logic is not possible in the English language.

Personally, I assume spelling errors are typos. I made a shocker myself in another thread.
Oh excellent. As an acquintance of mine used to say, "I have never met a person who both understood evolution and managed to refute it"

Looks like Berend will be another case of this.
Oh and James. You'd like this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qmglGWMsdk
"Significant delays in getting building consents" sinks homebuilder
PC, why surrender to them like that. Don't let them win like that. As they said on Penn and Peller's Bullshit, there are no bad words, just bad intentions. And as Penn said, "After all it is the meaning that is the meaning not the words."

The story is poof that building consent only ruins lives rather than improving them.
PC: If building consent delays (rather than resource consent) were the main reason for the company's collapse, it makes one think:- The legal requirement for processing BC applications is 20 working days, and while this is usually blown (by a few days), that's simply not time enough for significant fluctuation in the market to cause losses of the order these guys are talking about. Sounds like these guys were not producing adequate documentation. You can hate the game as much as you like, but if you get burned (or worse, burn other people - your clients/customers) for not playing by the rules, whose fault is it?- This shows more what a slim margin the spec-house design/build environment survives on.

If the fluctuations in a month and a half are enough to make your project no longer viable, you are not doing your cost estimates adequately. If your consents are taking longer than a month and a half, you are not preparing your documentation adequately.

Either way, it seems on the face that it is the design/build firm's lookout, and laying the blame at the feet of the Council seems a bit far out to me (and should to you too, from inside of the system). I feel terrible for the clients, who at the end of the day have suffered at the hands of a cowboy contracting firm, not at the whim of the Council. From the article:

"But an Aucklander who had signed up Meridian to build a home in Warkworth said last night that Master Build had not received his guarantee application form.

Eric Thompson also said there was not even an engineer's report or builder's plans to show for the $28,000 deposit he paid in late August."

As I said, for sure, hate the rules, but don't complain if you suffer from disregarding them. And if you cause misfortune to others who are relying on you to follow them, well - shame on you.

DenMT"The legal requirement for processing BC applications is 20 working days, and while this is usually blown (by a few days)..."

Excuse me while I bust a gut laughing.

How many building consents of any consequence have you got back within the last twelve months that were returned within 20 working days (plus or minus "a few days"?
I just went through all the files above my desk for the last year quickly, and the longest WCC took to come back with a consent was 40 days (that one a medium-size residential alteration with two suspensions in it which were due to omissions on my part). Other than that three residential alterations under 25 days (one in 16) - two new houses in 21 and 24 days - and four $200K+ commercial fitouts at 19, 22, 22, 23 and 28 days.

Last month we got back an application for a $6 million, complicated commercial fitout over a number of office tower levels from WCC in 10 working days, no queries. The Council got a letter of appreciation in response.

My understanding is that AK is much slower than here, but by how much I'm not sure. We're talking provincial councils though, Whangarei etc who presumably don't have the same workload pressures as the urban authorities.

Regardless of that, I am still amazed that you would blame the clients' misfortune on the TAs rather than the sloppy operation of Meridian, which one can plainly read through the article.

DenMT
Sorry but I have to comment on this. Agree with Den - if these people cannot make money in this environment they do not deserve to be in business. The builders and their coys around here are absolutely creaming it, and have been for years now.

That's capitalism Peter - the weak have to go sometimes to make way for the strong.
PC, this to-ing and fro-ing as to Council consent timeframes misses the material point; that there is no reason for the bastards to exist in the first place!

It's a bit like the old Soviets discussing the comparative lengths of the food queues.

If I want to build a carport on my property, why the fuck should I have to report to a petty bureaucrat, who I'm also forced to fund via rates, in order to do so?
Oh, and the affliction's not confined to NZ. North Sydney council took 18 months; yep, 18; to approve my sister's house plans. Every visit to the council seemed to result in yet another chq for $5000 - for sweet FA in return, of course.

*All shrubbery/foliage had to be listed, including colours thereof. And get this: if you decided to plant say, an apricot rhododendron instead of the pink one originally listed on the plans, a council twat could force you to rip it out and replace with the original.

Nazi fucks.

*Don't get any ideas, Den, or I'll be forced to come to Wgtn to smack you hard! :)
Sus: "If I want to build a carport on my property, why the fuck should I have to report to a petty bureaucrat, who I'm also forced to fund via rates, in order to do so?"

Because if it is poorly designed, and shoddily constructed, and you sell up, and Jane Doe moves in and there's a mild earthquake, and the connection between the support post and the footing fails and the carport roof falls in, right on Jane Doe's spleen, we need a better comeback than simply suing whoever it is that designed it, and whoever built it, or hoping their PI insurance covers a replacement spleen.

Obviously culpability lies with them, but cowboy design/build flogger-offers (Meridian sound like prime examples) are the exact reason why the industry needs a verification process. It is simply not good enough to let the market take care of poor workmanship, because it is simply not a robust enough solution. We can't trust the market to flush out all the half-skilled opportunistic shysters out there for a quick buck on the property market.

As PC will attest no doubt, it is actually not the easiest thing in the world to design a weatherproof, structurally sound, and well put-together building. The layperson can't simply look at a set of plans and see that he/she is getting taken for a ride. It is essential for the quality of NZs building stock that we have an independent verification process, as frustrating as it certainly is at times.

PS: On listing shrubbery etc, I am currently working on a large multi-unit social housing project, which during the resource consent process had to have landscape plans resubmitted three times for successive levels of detail. Starting at plant location, and ending at species, planted size, mature size, bag size, and appearance. Just because I agree with the need for a checking process, doesn't mean I agree with the current stringency!
Again you want to waive compliance costs and protect losers in your own industry - but not anyone elses - like the finance industry.

Last time I looked FBU were doing great. Coys that are not well managed go to the wall. Economics 101.

What astounding hyprocrisy.
Privatise the building consent business. When it comes to buying a house, whether or not it has been built to a certain standard will be on record, the buyer then decides.

Warwick
I am in total agreement re: private building certifiers. In my first job out of architecture school Nationwide were still around, and my boss got a building consent off of them for a new house in two days. As long as there is a centralised, agreed baseline for building standards, and every set of plans is subject to checking under those plans, it shouldn't matter who does the checking. A competitive environment would be good.

Obviously this would only hold for building consents, and the TAs would need to keep their hand in for resource consents, although I don't see why at least parts of the process couldn't be handled privately, vastly reducing the load on the TAs.

DenMT
...every set of plans is subject to checking under those STANDARDS...

No more reading the interwebs late at night for me.

DenMT
DenMT even if you are right the whole thing could still be avoided if consent was needed. And more importantly it breaches property rights which is enough reason to hate the system by itself. So even if you fail to abide by them there IS good reason to complain: because they violated the rights of you and your customers.

PC, I take it you failed to get them within that time. Or even close to it. That is of course what I'd expect from government, whether it be local or national.

DenMT, 40 days is still a lot longer than 20.

Anonymous 1, that is NOT capitalism. We don't habve capitalism. In capitalism consent wouldn't exist. I suggest you read Ayn Rand's Capitalism, The Unknown Ideal for full details on what capitalism really is.

Sus, you are right. As I said it breaches property rights.

DenMT, that does NOT justify violating the right of the property owner to do what he likes with his ownj property. There is NEVER any right to that. You are wrong that there is a need for more than suing. More would be a breach of property rights. There is never a need for rights violations. We CAN trust a FREE market to flush them out as customers in a free market won't go to them, thus putting them out of business, thus flushing them out.

Anoymous 2, I believe what PC is actually trying to protect is property rights, as often ignored thing that would greatly boost the economy if it was recognised.

Warwick and DenMT, privatising it STILL violates property rights and as such is still EVIL. No on has the right to tell others what they can and can't do with their own property. And don't get me started on Resource Consent! That's even more evil! It has stopped my mother (and others) from opening a perfectly legitamte business.
Kane, first of all, the 40 day consent was, as I pointed out, my fault. I submitted a fairly hastily-put-together set of documents and the client bore the brunt due to the ensuing delay. We wrote off the extra hours.

Quibbling aside, the essence of your rather vehement post as I take it is that people should be allowed to build whatever they like, with no required standard, as long as it causes no immediate harm to anyone else.

I see this as a hopelessly romantic ideal - if you applied it to the reality of today where well-meaning clients are still getting done over by seat-of-the-pants developers like Meridian seem to be, it just doesn't fly.

As I pointed out a bit laboriously, saying that the Council is in the wrong is ridiculous on the balance of facts. You say they 'violated the rights of you and your customer' - I say that Meridian, who owe due diligence to their clients, clearly failed in their responsibility. Working in the industry, I can guarantee you that the bottom fell out of Meridians boat due to them running way to fine a margin, and the Council is a convenient scapegoat for their poor management.

I am surprised that PC, who also works in the industry, has maintained radio silence on this one. I'm curious to know what he thinks.

At the end of the day Kane, entirely deregulating the construction industry and 'letting the buyer beware' is a totally Martian idea - the consequences would be unthinkable.

DenMT"I am surprised that PC, who also works in the industry, has maintained radio silence on this one..."

Radio silence does not indicate agreement. Sometimes it just means you're busy -- that Carlaw Park post took up a few hours I didn't have.

But I presume, Den, that you're aware of the Fallacy of Faulty Generalisation?

And I assume you've already read those other posts I linked to about the difficulties faced by builders?

And I presume you've noticed over the last few days the Master Builders and Certified Builders both highlighting this issue. Master Builders:The Master Builders Federation says builders are having to put up with consent delays of up to six months..

Chief executive Pieter Burghout says the statutory requirement is for building consents to be processed in 20 days, but builders are sometimes waiting three to six months.

He says slow processing of consents affects a company's cashflow in a big way.

Certified Builders:Derek Baxter from the Certified Builders Association says the level of detail needed to gain a resource consent is a struggle for all builders.

Mr Baxter says the process is inconsistent across the country and councils and builders need to work together to improve it.

And I presume you've also read the surveys quoted recently indicating (from the Herald) "Surveys showed nearly 50 per cent of building consents, or 40,000 each year, were not processed within the 20 working days required by the Building Act." Admittedly, these were quoted by Nick Smith, but I guess you'd be aware of the costs associated with uncertainty, and of all the uncertainties surrounding any project when waiting for consent, or for questions about consent.

We can all generalise from our own limited outlook -- and when after three months waiting I'm asked questions like, "Can you please specify the balustrade fixings," for a three-tread stair, I'm keen to generalise as well -- but there is more than enough evidence out there to support what Meridian's MD had to say, without needing to damn him without even any evidence to do so.
BTW, I see no more need for councils to vet buildings when you build them than I do for them to vet cars before you buy them.

Take them out of the loop and you would find Insurance companies taking a bigger role in specifying and ensuring standards (as they used to in many pre-war US states), and professional private certifiers taking a much bigger role in pre-purchase inspections (just as Hometune and the AA do for cars), and perhaps even pre-certification inspections during construction.

And 'Michelin Standards' for buildings? Why not. Better than our current gold-plated-but-already-tarnished Building Standards surely.

As Frank Lloyd Wright said of them, "The building codes of the democracies embody, of course, only what the previous generation knew or thought about building..."
PC, this will be unfortunately brief, as ale is about to be served.

I might be seen as a bit hard-hearted here, but if builders are suffering so much under the more stringent approach TAs are taking to vetting consents, they need to look at getting their documents prepared elsewhere.

In my first job, the boss had some builder mates who gave me a failed consent application to tart up and reapply for. It was three A4s with dimensions in pencil and very quick detail sketches. At that stage of course, I had no idea what the appropriate level of effort in documentation was for a building consent, so I laboured day and night producing a mountainous proliferation of paper, reinventing every wheel there was to be reinvented, and scrutinising every junction of materials.

Naturally I made a bunch of fundamental errors, and did way too many hours than what the job was worth (although in that job we wrote loads of hours off habitually), making a mountain out of a molehill. These days I have it much more streamlines...

However that experience gave me a good insight into the economy of documentation (obviously an extreme example) that the design/build ethic often operates on. If there was no mechanism other than the market to catch shoddy operators out, people would make a killing in property very quickly, and move offshore before the properties they hocked off sprang leaks, collapsed, or were blown away.

It takes an extraordinary faith in the good nature of mankind to countenance a building industry with out regulatory mechanisms. Here in the real world, there are way too many wolves ready to fleece the unwary.

That'll do. Beer time. Cheers all!

DenMT
Yes, DenMT, the consequences of letting people live their own lives their own way as they have the right to do would be unthinkable. But only to likes of collectivists like yourself. Objectivists have no problem thinking up the massive benefit everyone would get from a free market. History is littered with proof of the failure of collectivism and the success of true capitalism (as opposed to the fake capitalism that currently exists).

besides what about the issue of my mother and others needing resource consent to open a much needed business?

As PC said, the insurance companies would be your protection. Not good enough standard? Sorry we won't insure your building. That is all the incentive a rational builder needs and it is moral unlike consent.

You need no confidence in the good nature of mankind. You need only confidence in the free market's ability to choose competitors that do a good job. You are saying either implicately or explicately saying that man cannot be good, which is in itself evil. There may be wolves, but there are less of them than non-wolves. Especially in a free market.

Ultimately if builders fail because they met overly stringent and immoral standards it is not their fault. It is the fault of the people who created and uphold the standards.
112 MPs vote for 120 MPs
ACT sticking to their core principles again. Aren't they pleasantly consistent under Rodney? (even if 'they' are only two)But "opponents of the bill said a drop in numbers would mean less diversity in terms of race, gender and sexual orientation."

Stupid idiots! Diversity isn't the issue here nor should it be! It is about obeying their employers and wasting less money on unnecessary politicians.

Personally I think even 100 is way too many. 20 would be a good number.
I didn't know you were in favor of raising the drinking age pc. Over 70% of the populiation is in favor of that.
"ACT sticking to their core principles again. Aren't they pleasantly consistent under Rodney?"

Yep. They were the only two on the correct side of both questions yesterday.

Berend: Yep, you've got me. :-)

But don't let anyone ever peddle that myth MPs are your representatives, or are your voice in Parliament.
Well, we can agree on that pc. I don't need a representative. The only thing I need is a vote against the next tax increase. Very, very sad.
Peter, you're right. they don't represent us. They represent their own idiotic subjective rubbish!

But I don't agree on raising the drinking age. Not at all. Even if the voters want them to."opponents of the bill said a drop in numbers would mean less diversity in terms of race, gender and sexual orientation."

And you don't think they have a point? Liberalism and Libertarianism aren't about the will of the majority in some referendum, it's about the rights of minorities, especially the minority of one that is the individual, to live their lives free from government interference.

The fewer politicians we have, the easier it is for them to fuck us over. Traditionaly, states with very few politicians have been known as "dictatorships".

If New Zealand had 250 MPs, nothing would ever get done. And you know what? It would be worth the money."The fewer politicians we have, the easier it is for them to fuck us over."

Um...

"If New Zealand had 250 MPs, nothing would ever get done. And you know what? It would be worth the money."

It would be. If having 1,000 meant nothing got done it would be worth the money.

But I don't see any evidence for that being so.The fewer politicians we have, the easier it is for them to fuck us over.

Um, that is contradictory. The more of them there are the more wages payed for with stolen money from us, thus we get more fucked over. There are other problems too.

Traditionaly, states with very few politicians have been known as "dictatorships".

Incorrectly so. Dictorship is about how the state is ruled and how the rulers get into power not by how many rulers there are.

If New Zealand had 250 MPs, nothing would ever get done. And you know what? It would be worth the money.

The result may be, but the morality wouldn't. It'd take a lot of appropriated money to pay for them. A handful of morally funded and morals driven politicians would be much better. With them we'd WANT them to get stuff done as they'd be protecting our freedom, our rights.
NCEA: SHID*"...if the answer showed the required understanding."

My Maths and Physics teachers never paid too much attention to my spelling.

From the article:

"However, Mr Haque said text abbreviations would be penalised in some exams, including English, where candidates were required to show good language use."

So, like, wtf? Don't get sucked in by alarmist journalism. Nothing has actually changed.
Btw, I agree that NCEA is a stupid qualification that should be dumped, but when I did the International Baccalauraete they had a similar policy.
I had the misfortune to hear Karen Poutasi, CEO of NZQA, speak at the Otago alumni function on Tuesday night. (Why do I go to these things? They don't even have free booze any more.)

I couldn't follow much of her bullshit-bingo-winning effort as it was content-free. I'm told NZQA is implementing a staircasing framework for learners going forward. No idea what that is in txt-speak or English.

Having listened for somewhere between fifteen minutes and eternity to what NZQA is up to, am I any the wiser? On the contrary, having had my mind subjected to that mental slop, I suspect I'm actually a bit stupider.

Sounds to me like NZQA is facilitating a lose-lose paradigm for its stakeholders.
Well, well, Bernard .. the same Karen Poutasi who 'ran' - and I use the term loosely - Wellington Health.

She screwed health and now she's having a bloody good go at screwing education.

See. Bureaucrats are nothing if not consistent.
Required understanding? Not in English! Text spelling is poor English and as such should never be allowed in exams (especially English ones)!! Why not accept them making up words, explaining their meaning as long as they "show the required understanding"? That'd have the same effect on further ruining the poor control over the English language that the NZQA is now encouraging. They should be teaching them better control not allwoing them to use worse and get full marks in the exams!! Clearly proper use of the English language means nothing to the NZQA. Clearly they don't see proper use of the Enlish language as useful. It's bad enough that people drop commars a lot and misuse apostraphe's but now they want to allow that? Idiots! Kill the English language why don't you! The fact that the English exams don't accept them doesn't change the fact that they are incouraging bad use of the language, and thus killing it.

Lol, based on Bernard's comment they don't use English themsleves. Just like him I have no idea what, "staircasing framework for learners going forward" means. Lose-lose? Yep. If not expicately then implicately at least.

Sus... consistent at being useless and incosistent that is. Subjectivism, which they use, can only get you constitency at being useless and inconsistent. Where as objectivity gets you consistency in being uselful and consistent.
"NZQA is implementing a staircasing framework for learners going forward."

As opposed to implementing a travellator framework for learners going backwards.

Utter bollocks.
Before we go overboard, I think it would be prudent to find out whether this announcement means something like:

a) You can write an answer on, for example, Shakespeare, in txt speak and not be marked down.

Which would be apalling, or whether this announcement means something more innocouous like:

b) If you are doing a creative writing piece in an english exam you can use txt speak - e.g. "I picked up cellphone from beside the fruit bowl and texted Cyril 'cul8r m8'" and not be marked down.

Which I don't think anyone can complain about. Context people.
Hmsh,

So dat k if u cn only cmmnc8 lke ths bt cn mnge 2 do sme mafs?

Evn if u can do sme mafs, u shud stl b able 2 wrte basik englsh.

Thrz a diff btwn spln mstks & wrtn lke ths. ROTFLBBQ YMMV.

Yours sincerely,Craig :-)
I don't give a fuck what the topic is - any of my students using "texting language" in any essay I set them (btw, hehe, I'm in the tertiary sector), will be automatically marked down on these points (marking schedule):

Lucid in style and organisation.Coherent in argument; balanced in judgement and giving attention to all parts of the question.Mature, perceptive in evalutation, judicious in personal response.Comprehensive in knowledge of the work(s).

My response would be typically harsh in the first instance - in the words of a lyricist much cleverer than me.

"...so if you give 'em a quick short, sharp, shock, they won't do it again. Dig it? "

But then, the NZQA are run by a pack of namby pamby big girls blouses, more concerned about the little darlings self-esteems.
Having just completed a bunch of painful assesments written by these clowns, I think they must have gone to the Officer Crabtree Scull of Goad Onglish...
Good on you Steve! That's a good marking criteria. Language rules exist for a reason. It's to make language meet it's purpose: to pass along concepts in a way others can understand. I mean I had no idea what Craig said and I have no interest in trying to figure it out even though I could. Or in asking what he said. You are right about the self-esteem.

Oh, that's funny Oswald!
Surprise, surprise - turns out it's all bollocks. I'd been wondering why no-one's been able to provide a link to the actual "report" that started all this, just the brief summary in the Herald.
I don't this is so much bollocks, but a climb-down:

"Bali Haque, deputy chief executive of the authority, said there had been no change to guidelines and there was no specific policy about text language.

"If people are expecting they can come up with an exam script full of text and pass, then they're dreaming.""

That contradicts what he told television news before everybody reacted. He's backed down. Good.
In that case, can you you or anyone else give me a link to the actual original statement or article that got all of this started? What exactly did he "tell television news before everybody reacted"?
Josh, he said it was too late to backg down on txt language being allowed in exams.

I am glad he changed his mind about that.
Frank Lloyd Wright - V.C. Gift Shop, interior
The top photo looks like the interior of my house. The design, colour and shape of the handles of the stairway are almost exactly the same; and the curves are the same as the upstairs gallery which looks down to the lounge.

I am in love with the architect of my home. There is not a day goes by when my partner and I do not extol his praises and our absolute delight of being able to live in the home we love so much.
Here's an opportunity to give your architect a free ad RR. And maybe, too, a photo of your home?
The top one seems more suitable for a home than a museum or a shop.
Sense from Parliament
Sense? Wishful thinking. The no vote is because of this.
"Youth Alcohol Harm Reduction"

I love that title - and that so many MPs went against it, knowing that they can now be said they do not want to protect the country's young people.

I was in college here in the US when many states were raising the drinking age from 18 to 21 One year each of three years. But I had friends on each side of the limit by about 1 month.

One was considered to be an "adult" each of the three years. One was considered an "adult" each December, between his birtday & the next bump of the law on 1 January. The third was made a legal "child" again each year.

As for me? I was 16 when it started, and definitely under the age limit each of those 3 years. And those laws did nothing to stop me on my 1 year / 120 World Beer Tour at the local Grill & Bar.
It was victory for the people that wanted it to stay the same, which is rare. Usually Labour people that create Bills win. Sadly the nest victory isn't due for another 46 years based on the current trend. :-P
Should adults be allowed to drink?
I notice that point 10 on the 12 points to keep the age at 18 page metions that our drinking culture is the real issue here. And I agree,

But who's going to pay/ educate for change? I can't see the breweires fronting up with the cash. . . And it would seem that Government and education don't have such a fantasic track record . .
I was livid when I heard about the bill on the news and elated when I heard on Nightline last night that it failed. The bill is a blatant rights violation. Sadly they ahve other measure. Hasn't it occured to them that the best way to cure a drinking problem culture is campaigns against it and educating people? Assuming people want to listen to the campaigns and education that is. If not nothing we can do would stop them. The irrational will always be such until they come to the conclusion on their own that they are acting to their own destruction.

To like a little bit of alcohol in celebration of your life and its continuation is OK, as long as it isn't taken to the point of getting drunk. Especially not the intention of getting drunk the way many people do.

Also, I personally think that there should be NO minimum drinking age as such a thing is a blatant rights violation.
Why freedom? What freedom?
Hi Peter,

Thanks for the taking the time to engage (primarly with I/S but with me in passing).

I'll blog a reply either this weekend or next and give you a heads-up when I do

cheers
I'll chuck a couple of things in...

- Property rights: What I take from your agrument is that a largish amount of protection of property is beneficial. This does not get you all the way to the absoluteness I see in your position from where I'm standing.

Also, if this is moral point (is it?)what's the magic premise that gets you from this-is-so to we-should-do-thus? Just out of pedantic curiosity.

- Markets: Individual choices, particularly made en masse effects the availablity of choices for others. Often in a good way, sometimes badly.

Put it this way - I consider my assertion that it's possible for a lack of regulation in a market to leave -everyone- worse off no more faith-based that yours that it isn't.
Freedom only for the strong = anarchy. Libertarianism has government to protect the weak from their rights (to their bodies and property) being attacked by the strong. Libertarians oppose the initiation of force, which is the tool of the "strong". Remember, the state is always the strongest.

The footpath imprisonment argument is absurd. Who would buy a house without some rights to the footpath? Local footpaths and roads could be held by body corporates for the interests of local property owners.
I read "desired social end" and I shivered with fear.

It is for your own good. Yeah right.
About the foot paths: as we see in South Auckland, the public foot paths are filled by prostitutes, drunks and other drug users and certain times of the day, and the people who want to go on their own businesses have to stay in their homes at such times.
I/S’s “private footpaths” debate was initially with me. His argument was along the lines of what if, in a free market, all the footpaths around his house were acquired by a private concern that denied him the use of them. That, apparently, would infringe his right to liberty.

It was a drawn out debate, and after walking through the bizarre circumstances that would have to occur for such a situation to arise, I conceded that the scenario was possible, however remotely, in a hypothetical libertarian society, but that his right to liberty was not infringed because he was *still free* to travel by helicopter, through neighbours’ back yards, etc. etc. Just as the right to free speech does not mean that someone has to provide you with a printing press, the right to liberty does not mean that someone has to provide you with a means of transport.
Libertians deficating property right? That's a blatant contradiction! Contradictions cannot exist in reality. Not in part or in whole. Only in the beliefs of people can they occur. Not the use of "occur" instead of "exist". This is because our beliefs are not existence, just an attempt to recognise it.

but it is property rights that make all other rights possibleIndeed. As Ayn Rand said, "Without property rights no other rights can exist."

And indeed all property, especially our own lives, the most valuable and important property we have.

One definition biologists have given to the word human is, "the rational animal". This coincides with your statement of the mind.

PC your market comments and your freedom ones are of course quite true. That is why my books will evolve around the idea of the free market, a free society, and rational thought.

Lyndon, the "magic" premise is reason. Of course I wouldn't use the term magic for reason. I'd use the term "reality". Also individual choices only badly effect others if you make irrational choices. Rational choices never have "losers", only winners. PC and those like him (i.e. me) DON'T use faith. We use REASON, which uses REALITY.

Him not being able to use the footpaths an infringement of his liberty? Rubbish! Your points of that are good, rbc, though he is only free to use the neighbour's yard if they let him. But he is still free to use the roads. Beside, the footpaths would never be sold like that anyway. It's too unrealistic.
Just FYI, I don't consider myself responded to....That long-range protection of the values we ourselves have created is what property rights represent.

So, let me get this straight. You define all rights as property. Then you say that you therefore need property rights to have any rights?

Markets are simply the sum of voluntary choices taken by individuals seeking to better themselves.

Well Lyndon, to ask a question you must first know what actually consitutes an answer!

Oh, and it is a bit off to simply dismiss responding posts in the royal fashion. Harks of intellectual dishonesty/ or a fundamental laziness. Simply can't be bother to take the time to correct another human beings erronous thinking. Oh, the arrogabce!

Sean.
Sam, what it means is that without the right to property no right can exist. Look at it this way: if you arenm't allowed to do what you want with the things you own then you have no freedom and without freedom you have no true life, only a living death. A living death cannot support rights, olny life can. There are no degrees of freedom. You either have it or you don't.

As for you Lyndon, you are wrong. I responded to your "magic premise" question.
Sean - Fair enough.

Actually it's just that work feels appallingly busy at the moment and I'm on a high threshold for my own responses.

Perhaps I would have been better to say, "What?"

I basically meant that as shorthand for, either Kane's comment's didn't address my comments in any significant way (except for my implications about dogmatism and bald assertions - though I release the arguments about markets are more endless than anything I want to eembark on right now) OR someone needs to explain how they do in a way even I can understand.

I don't really want to debate, I'm just curious about the answers.

Kane - When I asked for a premise, meant the logical kind, preferrable with the associated syllogism.
Lyndon, I'm sorry you don't think you've been replied to, but I doubt whether you'll be persuaded about property rights -- a principle integrating an enormous number of concretes and other abstract principles -- only by one small blog post.

All I can really do here with such a vast integration is to scratch the surface, as I did above.

If you really do want to know more, then can I suggest you follow those links I offered in the post itself, perhaps read some of my posts linked under the property rights category, and for even more try some book excperts or book-length arguments.

Ayn Rand's essay 'Man's Rights' is a good place to start (you can find it in her book 'Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal'), and Tom Bethell's book 'The Noblest Triumph' if you want a good history of the subject, and Tara Smith's book 'Moral Rights & Political Freedom' if you want philosophy.
Yeah... I had a feeling this would all end in reading.

Ta.
I've now blogged a reply to Peter Creswell here:http://tinyurl.com/yaoqxj

or

http://laanta.blogspot.com/2006/11/atlas-mugged-reply-to-duncan-bayne-and.html
What's with the 'we,' Brian?
Rodney Hide gives a good argument & it does make sense.
Nice to see a politician that is in parliament speak good sense for once. That is so rare we porbably won't see one until 2165 now. Shame the good ones like, Libertianz don't do better. As soon as I have the time and resources (among other factors) I am going to be actively promoting the Libz. That won't be for a while though as I have not meet all of those factors yet.
Kane said...[As soon as I have the time and resources (among other factors) I am going to be actively promoting the Libz]

No, you should be promoting Rodney Hide, because the ACT party will have a chance to get to parliament, next time. Rodney promote things which are similar to the Libz.
Nah, Rodney and Act has said things that I do NOT support, while Libertarianz have said only things I support, so to support Rodney and Act would be to act contrary to my beliefs and one should never act contrary to my beliefs. And of course by support I mean more than just vote for them. I mean donate money and promote them at the bare minimum. To do that for a party I don't like just because they have a chance to get into parliament would be wrong of me since I don't like them.
Stadium decision-making is management by blundering around
Indeed. As I hinted at earlier, we won't get shares in this stadium either despite our money paying for it. Shares/part ownership is the only way in which I would be willing to invest my money in any venture. But the government seems to think we should involuntarily invest our money.
US mid-term elections: A house divided?
Great explanation. It has enabled me to get my head around this. Other writers can be just too darn technical.
Looks as though small-l libertarians in the U.S. might be important players in the mid-term elections:http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,227820,00.html
Thanks Richard. I'll add that to the front page.

You'll have to Refresh the page every so often to check on progress.
I've seen several reports nothing that libertarians didn't vote GOP, so it might be they have become some measureable force, at least they were on the radar.
An architecture quiz
Your facility for 'snark' when it comes to the artistic success of others never ceases to astound me, PC.

In accordance with the highest principles of libertarian pursuit of wealth, Gehry has created a brand for himself which is respected and sought after across the world. Regardless of your well-established scorn for his aesthetic, he will continue to get incredible commissions, rake in tons of loot, and break new aesthetic ground.

His is a challenging take on architectural form, but it is forward-looking, dynamic, and intriguing. His position is one to be aspired to, not sneered at. The derision which you heap on highly succesful and respected artistic achievement is pretty ugly at times, and others, just a bit sad.

DenMT
Mercy to the guilty is injustice to the innocent.

Meaning: if one praises trash to the sky, then what accolades are left for works of real genius?

There are two ways to destroy genius. One is by eliminating geniuses (difficult); the other is simply to praise trash as genius (much easier) until people eventually forget what genius looks like.
I'm going with (f): A crumpled up piece of used toilet paper.

"...he will continue to get incredible commissions... etc."

The same could be said for the retards who make and take methamphetamine; the same can be said about prostitutes.

The mere fact that what you hock makes you a lot of money and is popular doesn't grant you my respect and admiration as of right.
If it's delibrately supposed to look like that - how can you tell if someone dropped the model between design and presentation?"If it's deliberately supposed to look like that - how can you tell if someone dropped the model between design and presentation?"

Good question. The story is told that when Gehry, the architect of this piece of trash, produced a model of another screwed up piece of titanium-clad garbage for a Manhattan museum, he was asked at an exhibit of the drawings and model whether or not the model had been installed back to front. He couldn't tell.
There are a number of extremely expensive crappy "artistic" momuments around Auckland, one being the under the ASB Building, apparently 1 million dollars for that eyesore. Not to mention the one between the southern and northwestern motorway on ramps which I think is supposed to be a Puhutakawa Tree Flower.
Looks like a building that has failed to survive an earthquake. However, I would say it is B and E.

DenMT, just because people value it doesn't mean it is worthwhile. As Roark from The Fountainhead said, a building should have a look that fits it's intended purpose not a "flavour" A building that looks like trash is contradictory to all but an irrational purpose of it's building. And if the building has an irrational purpose then it has no good reason for existing in the first plave.

How is trash something to aspire to? It isn't. As Ayn Rand said, "Art is the metaphyisical recreation of the artist's value judgments." So if a artist creates trash he values trash. This makes clear that his values are anti-life (as illustrated by PC's comment, " Mercy to the guilty is injustice to the innocent"), which is something to sneer at not aspire to.

I have been writing for more than 13 years and I can tell you that experience as an artist has taught me that the value of art is based on your beliefs not it's look. This is always true, not matter how much you try to evade it. You are free to try evade your beliefs but you are not free to base all your actions and creations on them.

Respect and admiration need to be based on a person's beliefs not their wealth and success.
Quantum Physics Debate, 1: The 'Many Worlds' Interpretation
I would like to correct a point in PC's introduction. He wrote that "[p]ut simply, the claim is that each time a choice is made, a new universe springs into existence."

Most Many Worlders would not in fact claim that and it is not my claim. As I explain in my post, the idea of splitting has been replaced with the idea of differentiation. Universes are not created at each decision alternative, rather previously identical universes differentiate from each other.

As I also explain, there are an infinite number of each identical universe (the multiplicity of each identical universe is infinite). Because such universes are exactly identical, they are said to be fungible.

Another example of something that is fungible is money. A dollar in your bank account is fungible with a dollar in my bank account. We can interchange the dollars but because the dollars represent exactly the same thing, nothing has changed. There is such a thing as one dollar, but every dollar in New Zealand is fungible with every other dollar. One cannot label a particular dollar and say this is the *real* dollar. Similarly with fungible universes. For this reason we have to identify ourselves with every identical version of ourselves in a set of identical universes. We cannot point to one version and say this is the real me.
We truly have reached the end of science if utter speculation is now the main subject of scientist.

But it makes for good science fiction.
Did you actually read the post Berend? If Many Worlds is utter speculation, then how was it that Deutsch's pursuit of this idea led him to the discovery of universal quantum computers? And what is your explanation for how Shor's algorithm works?

I have given you lots of reasons why the Many Worlds Interpretation is the only tenable explanation so far for all the quantum phenomena we observe, and I have given you links that show how you can arrive at the "many worlds" conclusion through a simple chain of reasoning based on single-photon interference experiments. The commonsense idea that there is only one universe is wrong and it is that people are so wedded to the idea of one universe that leads to so much confusion and philosophic nonsense in quantum physics.

Albert Einstein could not accept that quantum mechanics is a complete description of reality because he (rightly) distained "spooky action at a distance" and fundamental stochasticity ("God does not play dice") and it is stunning to read in the famous Einstein-Podolsky -Rosen paper how close the authors come to the idea of multiple universes. For example, in this passage:

Starting then with the assumption that the wave function does give a complete description of the physical reality, we arrived at the conclusion that two physical quantities, with noncommuting operators, can have simultaneous reality.

!

Instead of seeing what this implies, EPR concluding that this is evidence that quantum mechanics is incomplete. Our commonsense idea that there is only one universe can really blind us.
I’m the other half of RebelRadius, so I guess I could be RebelCircumference, with a PhD in physics, so I’ve some beginning of an understanding of quantum mechanics which has been enlightened by studying under some excellent practitioners in this area.

The text itself is a good explanation of the MWI (Many Worlds Interpretation), which to explain anything in the area of quantum mechanics in English and it still to remain accurate is extremely hard to do. So much of this field, read 99%+, can only be described using some rather complex maths. It is only by understanding the maths that you truly get an understanding of the concepts.

The MWI interests me from a long time ago from it being used as a plot device in science fiction, but on being exposed to the science behind it I have my doubts on it being a valid interpretation. It does avoid some of the complexities of things like wave function collapse and wave-particle duality which do not seem to make any sense when using just the English explanations of what is happening, however when you start to understand the mathematics behind it, the apparent illogicalities are logical.

For the idea of MWI allowing free will, yes, it does explain how for the universe you are now in you have selected it, but is it really free will when for every quantum event you will have selected all possible routes? To my understanding, this means far from having free will, you must take every possible route.

For the moment, MWI, along with several other explanations, seem to be potentially consistent with reality. The mathematics around each model can be mathematically correct and internally consistent, however this need not mean that they describe the physical reality.

This is very similar to some other ideas in quantum mechanics, like string theory, which can be incredibly elegant mathematical models of reality that may or may not correspond to physical reality.

I eagerly await future developments in this field as I see what I studied at university become more and more outdated, a bit like an astronomy book I own from the late 1800’s, which ponders how the sun is powered. It has calculations on how much coal is being burned and how long it will last, with confusion on how this does not quite match the predicted age of the universe as the coal should have run out long ago.
Brian S said...[As I explain in my post, the idea of splitting has been replaced with the idea of differentiation.]

Brian, you've quoted in the other thread that NO SPLITTING is taking place, but PRE-EXISTING multiple unverses. It means that they were there already, which to sum it up, they had no beginning or no Big Bang. So, if this is the case, then how MWI fits in with General Relativity (GR) ? The Big Bang and the origin of time & space is a consequence of GR. Are you saying that the PRE-EXISTING multiple unverses were there before the Big Bang and when the Bang started creating our own universe, then somewhere along the line it (our universe) evolves itself to become parallel to those pre-existing multiple universes?

you also said...[Because such universes are exactly identical]

Could you clarify, your meaning of 'identical' here? I mean that the Copenhagen Interpretation (CI) of Quantum Mechanics, does explain & have demonstrated by experiment of 'Teleportation' phenomena, where physical properties (operators for momentum, spin, energy, etc,...) of a particle in room 'A' has been teleported to a another particle in another physical separable room 'B'. This said that both particles 'A' & 'B' are IDENTICAL. This is my question. BTW, the team members that did this experiment was the same ones who 'confirm the non-local universe' in a paper that I posted a link to in the other thread.

If you answer that it means identical in all their (other universes) physical states, ie, operators for momentum, spin, energy, etc, of each particles), can you point out of how or where MWI has derived this identical phenomena.
"As I explain in my post, the idea of splitting has been replaced with the idea of differentiation. Universes are not created at each decision alternative, rather previously identical universes differentiate from each other."

Oh come on Brian, that's just differentiating hairs.
Brian S said...[I have given you links that show how you can arrive at the "many worlds" conclusion through a simple chain of reasoning based on single-photon interference experiments.]

Now, can you explain of how MWI invoke the interference from other universes, because , this is a violations of property rights of this universe if particles from other universes just pop-in uninvited to our universe everytime there is a single-photon interference experiment is performed in our backyard. So, a brief explanation from you regarding the interpretation of MWI about the single-photon example, would be good.

Can you also account if MWI say anything of how particles of our Universe can do the same by interfering in events ( experiments) in other universes, by entering their universe uninvited?
Wow... an introduction to quantum physics by someone who obviously knows very little about it... fascinating.

But I guess if real knowledge was a requirement for an opinion then most bloggers would be out of a hobby, I guess.
Wow...another anonymous comment providing yet more evidence of the vacuity of anonymously-posted comments.
MWI proposals...[Unfortunately these are not yet technically feasible (and some may be conceptually wrong), but we should not be surprised that the Many World Interpretation makes different predictions to its rivals for it has different assumptions.]

That is exactly why it has to be dismissed. If it is technically not feasible, it can never be TESTED. The reason, that it can never be TESTED is because of the non-interactions amongst many universes. This is similar to proving GOD. There is no way to prove that there God exist as the notion of GOD does not physically interact with our universe.

MWI will only be testable if the notion of GOD could be tested physically.
FF -

Most people have the idea that only the present moment is real, that past moments no longer exist, and that futures moments are yet to be. We know from General Relativity that this commonsense view is wrong. Things that happen in the same moment for you may not happen in the same moment for me if our reference frames differ. For example, you and I may disagree about when two balls hit the ground. Depending on how we are moving with respect to each other, and where we are, then I might maintain that the two balls hit the ground simultaneously while you might maintain that they hit the ground one after the other. So for you and I, the present moment does not have the same content. These two viewpoints are not inconsistent, it is just that each of us partitions space-time into moments differently.

In General Relativity, then, there is the idea of space-time and we partition space-time into moments according to our reference frame (similarly, we can slice a loaf of bread many ways). Space-time exists eternally. Moments are not created or destroyed. They just are. It is the same in the multiverse - just that there are a hell of a lot more moments! In this conception of things, the Big-Bang is, to quote Julian Barbour, "just another card in the deck".
Brian,

I asked you question about a horse, you then answered back my question about a donkey.

I am not gonna move forward, to ask my next question in this debate, if you're EVASIVE.

Now answer the questions, and don't obfuscicate.

Did the other Multiple Universes had a beginning or not? YOU CLAIMED in the other thread, that they're all pre-existing universes differentiating themselves, when you denied that they are not splitting.

- How did they originate? - Did they have a beginning or not?- If they had a beginning in the Big Bang, why didn't General Relativity (GR) predict those parallel universes in its formulations, since all the predictions of GR has been so far been confirmed experimentally.

your said...[Space-time exists eternally.]

WRONG... Space-time had a beginning when the Big Bang started. Anything that had a beginning is not eternal. To ask a question such as what was time or space before Big Bang is irrelevant because, space & time were created at the moment of the BANG. What on earth is this? You must stop playing with words, and try to dig into the physical realities that we debating here.
Brian S said..[In the Many Worlds Interpretation, other universes exist and affect each other and we can observe the results of this experimentally - for example when we carry out interference experiments.]

Brian, you've got to be joking here. Where in the page for the double slit experiment you quoted (see link below) that say, the result confirmed the existence of Multiple Universes.

"Double-Slit"http://www.hqrd.hitachi.co.jp/em/doubleslit.cfm

It shows that you've just read the book 'The Fabric of Reality' and then become expert in Quantum Mechanics.

The double-slit is explained by the Copenhagen Interpretation. I have actually done the double-slit experiment when I was at university, so that is why I asked you in my previous post to explain it. If you can't explain it , then your whole reliance on the book, 'The Fabric of Reality' as your bible, must be dismissed as fantasy.
Brian said...[We can infer it from a purely non-mathematical, physical argument, as David Deutsch does in Chapters 2 and 9 of his book The Fabric of Reality when he considers various single-photon interference experiments (see also this video).]

What makes MWI inference any more sense, than say, someone claims that it is GOD who influences the the single-photon outcome? This single-photon interference is again explained by the Copenhagen Interpretation.

Again Brian, you haven't seen a real beam-splitter have you?

David's explanation, that after the photon is split, half will go to other universes and the remaining stays in our universe. How do you know that half of the photon is going to other universes WITHOUT observing them? This formalism has been covered by CI.

You can find the type of apparatus that David described in his video at the Advanced Photonics lab of the Physics Department , Auckland University at the 7th floor. So, this sort of arrangement of mirrors, beam-splitters, optical-delays (delaying the pulse by a small amount of time), tunable lasers (varying photon intensity), optical-rotators (rotating the photon-pulse's polarisation), optical amplifiers (laser amplifier), wavelength multiplexers (combination of different photon-pulses into one pulse). If you want to see this lab, then you can go to see a nice German chap called Professor Rainer Leonhardt, who can organised his post-doc students to show you around.

Did you think that David's apparatus, is a new setup to test the MWI? NO, that setup is OLD, where any fibre-optic telecommunication systems of today, does contain a similar setup. This is how a device called wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) in optical communication systems work. All the signals (from different channels) and combined into one photon pulse, which then travel from source to destination. At the destination, a diffraction grating (multi-slits) is used to split the single pulse into difference channels so these are now separated to be routed into different end-points.

So, David's video is not a proof of multiple universes. Actually, he explained of how MWI fits in with the known apparatus he described.
FF -

I answered your question re. the Big-Bang via an analogy with General Relativity. In GR, space-time does not evolve, it simple exists. As does the multiverse.
Brian S said...[Furthermore, the Many World Interpretation can be used to derive the Born probability rule of Quantum Mechanics.]

Yes, but MWI had still to explain or derive thousands other Quantum Mechanics theoretical framework. Nice effort that it can derive Born Probability, but how about 'Quantum Squeezed States' ? Can MWI explain this ?

In the differentiation model, the number of universes is constant (infinite) and universes are not created or destroyed. Universes exist eternally, just like moments in General Relativity - see my comment in reply to FF.

The | in the second diagram indicates that universes are fungible (interchangable). Although we can't , for example, distinguish between the 'A's we can define a notion of thickness, or measure. This can't be done in the first diagram. (FF: fungible universes are like the atoms in a Bose-Einstein Condensate: we can't distinguish the atoms but there is such a thing as how many atoms are in the condensate).

Measure is a very important concept. It governs the proportion of universes in which things turn out one way as opposed to another way. And this is where the connection with free will comes in RebelCircumference. For human beings are one of the greatest forces in the multiverse for making sure things do not turn out equally. So although X and Y are real alternatives and although we do choose X AND Y, we do not do so equally.
"This can't be done in the first diagram"

Whoops - I meant this can't be done in the splitting model.
Brian S said...[In GR, space-time does not evolve, it simple exists.]

Now, we're stuck in language mis-interpretation again. Could you clarify your understanding of the term evolve?
Falafulu Fisi said...[Could you clarify, your meaning of 'identical' here? I mean that the Copenhagen Interpretation (CI) of Quantum Mechanics, does explain & have demonstrated by experiment of 'Teleportation' phenomena.]

The first Teleportation was experimentally observed about 3 years ago. Again, this was predicted using the Copenhagen Interpretation.

Prof. Anton Zeilinger is a co-author of the above paper, and he was involved in the Innsbruck team that experimentally confirmed the 'Non-Local Universe'.

Brian, can you explain 'Quantum Teleportation' from an MWI perspective ?

An off-topic, but applicable. Do you think that Nicky Hagger & Ian Wishart are entangle entities, teleported entities, or completely they are entities from other parallel universes , which they have landed in our universe and caused havoc?
Here is the best animation of the Double-Slit experiment, I've seen on the internet.

General Relavity:The loaf of bread that is space-time never changes. It was not created and it will never be destroyed. It just is. The loaf can be sliced many ways into moments (depending on a choice of reference frame). The Big-Bang is a part of the space-time continuum. We understand it through moments. But to say that moments were created by the Big-Bang is to imply an external time outside the universe. There is none.

Many Worlds:The rather-more-complicated loaf of bread that is the multiverse never changes. It was not created and it will never be destroyed. The loaf can be sliced many ways into universes (depending on a choice of basis). The big-bang is a part of the multiverse. We understand it as a point at which all universes were fungible. But to say universes were created by the Big-Bang is to imply some external basis outside the multiverse. There is none.

I recall that PC had an excellent post on the issue of existence. Things just exist. There is no such thing as nothing. That is the case with moments and the multiverse.
rebel radius, indeed. Read Greg Egan on how to prevent taking every path. His invention of the qusp is a brilliant idea.

brian, in former days we had experiments that guided theory. Or we had theory that gave us clear experiments that could distinguish between theories.

If I started to take anything for which some case can be made seriously without any experimental validation I'll be changing my scientific theories more often than my clothes.
Berend -

"The point that theorists tend to miss is that the multiplicity of reality is not only, or even primarily, a consequence of quantum theory. It is quite simply an observed fact. Any interference experiment (such as the two-slit experiment), when performed with individual particles one at a time, has no known interpretation in which the particle we see is the only physical entity passing through the apparatus. We know that the invisible entities passing through obey the same phenomenological equations of motion (e.g. geometrical optics) as the single particle we do see. And we know from Einstein-Podolski-Rosen-type experiments, such as that of Aspect, that these not-directly-perceptible particles are arranged in extended ‘layers’ each of which behaves internally like an approximately classical universe. Admittedly all these observations detect other universes only indirectly. But then, we can detect pterodactyls and quarks only indirectly too. The evidence that other universes exist is at least as strong as the evidence for pterodactyls or quarks."

Nice to hear from you. The MWI has been put forward by some quite respected physicists and, I believe, appeals to quite a number of other physicists because it provides a way around some long-standing issues associated with measurements on quantum systems. In particular, the basic equation of quantum mechanics, the Schroedinger equation, describes a continuous ("smooth") evolution of the state of a system into a superposition (or sum) of many possible states, each existing at the same time in some sense. However, measurements on quantum systems appear to cause an instantaneous and generally unpredictable "jump" to a single state of the system, which seems inconsistent with a smooth and continuous evolution.

The MWI gets around this "jump" by saying that all possible states in the superposition continue to exist, but in different universes, and we only "see" one universe.

Now, this theory is not inconsistent with what we observe, but it's also not really possible to test this theory, which is why many physicists (including myself) are sceptical, or simply don't think that seriously about it. I believe there are more practical and conventional ways of thinking about the issue of measurement.

In particular, there is a whole field of research associated with quantum measurement theory, which essentially starts from the Schroedinger equation and models the interaction of quantum systems with measurement devices. It is largely able to describe the effects of measurements in a consistent way and show how it is that the measured system "jumps" into a particular state.

Hope that's of some use or interest to you.

Regards,Scott.

http://www.phy.auckland.ac.nz/html/s_parkins.html

-------- End Scott's Message ----------

Now, I've said to you many times that MWI is physically UNTESTABLE, and that is exactly what Scott's email message stated above. The only other theory in human history that is is UNTESTABLE is the existence of imaginary entities, such as GOD, dead people's spirits, etc, etc,... If something is physically UNTESTABLE as GOD, MWI, etc, etc, then it must be dismissed outright.

You can send a message to Scott if you're still in doubt.

You stated in your article that the opponent's of MWI are not upto date on the latest. I say that it is you who is not upto date on Quantum Physics research, which is obvious from Scott's message that "quantum measurement theory" has been advanced in recent times which try to solve the paradoxes. BTW, it is obvious that Scott is a skeptic and opponent of MWI and he is so upto date on all publications relating Quantum Optics & Quantum Computing. Some of his publications are listed on his website.
FF,

Thanks for posting the email from Scott. Here is my response:

Nice to hear from you. The MWI has been put forward by some quite respected physicists and, I believe, appeals to quite a number of other physicists because it provides a way around some long-standing issues associated with measurements on quantum systems.

Yes, and one of the papers I linked to in my original post entitled "100 Years of the Quantum" indicates that John Wheeler has finally come around and is now a Many Worlder.

In particular, the basic equation of quantum mechanics, the Schroedinger equation, describes a continuous ("smooth") evolution of the state of a system into a superposition (or sum) of many possible states, each existing at the same time in some sense. However, measurements on quantum systems appear to cause an instantaneous and generally unpredictable "jump" to a single state of the system, which seems inconsistent with a smooth and continuous evolution.

The MWI gets around this "jump" by saying that all possible states in the superposition continue to exist, but in different universes, and we only "see" one universe.

"Gets around this" makes the MWI sound like a dodge, when in fact it is an explantion.

Now, this theory is not inconsistent with what we observe,

And is in fact consistent with everything we observe.

but it's also not really possible to test this theory, which is why many physicists (including myself) are sceptical, or simply don't think that seriously about it. I believe there are more practical and conventional ways of thinking about the issue of measurement.

In particular, there is a whole field of research associated with quantum measurement theory, which essentially starts from the Schroedinger equation and models the interaction of quantum systems with measurement devices. It is largely able to describe the effects of measurements in a consistent way and show how it is that the measured system "jumps" into a particular state.

Note that Scott has put quotes around the word "jump". This is because in quantum measurement theory the jump is instantaneous and unpredictable. The jump is furthermore undetectable: we never catch a system in the process of jumping. The quotes are around the word "jump" because Scott knows that the jump is not the type of physical jump we are all familiar with, which is not instantaneous, not unpredictable, and not undetectable. Scott's "jump" is instantaneous, unpredictable, and undetectable. Therefore Scott cannot in fact directly test this jump and must infer it indirectly, and this is, in principle, no different to the type of reasoning that Many Worlders use. The criticism that the MWI is untestable is therefore one that he cannot consistently maintain.

Scott's explanation is inferior to the MWI for a number of reasons, including the following:

1. It assumes that causality is instantaneous, even across light minutes. This violates relativity, not only the light-speed constraint, but also that there is no relativity of simultaneity: the jump is instantaneous across in *all* reference frames.

2. It cannot explain the apparent randomness of the jump

3. It cannot explain what sort of reality a system has before measurement. Does he maintain that objects are actually in many states prior to measurement, or does he maintain that these states are just possibilities, one of which is actualized on measurement? Or are we just not supposed to ask the question? When the unseen entities passing through the apparatus in a single-photon interference experiment are found to have all the properties of a photon (see Deutsch quote in my previous comment), what are we to regard these as, if not photons?

Scott mentions that he doesn't think seriously about the MWI. I mentioned in my post that it was Deutsch's interest in the MWI that led him to discover universal quantum computers. If he had followed the counsel of pragmatists, then this discovery may never have happened.
FF,

Thanks for posting the email from Scott. Here is my response:

Nice to hear from you. The MWI has been put forward by some quite respected physicists and, I believe, appeals to quite a number of other physicists because it provides a way around some long-standing issues associated with measurements on quantum systems.

Yes, and one of the papers I linked to in my original post entitled "100 Years of the Quantum" indicates that John Wheeler has finally come around and is now a Many Worlder.

In particular, the basic equation of quantum mechanics, the Schroedinger equation, describes a continuous ("smooth") evolution of the state of a system into a superposition (or sum) of many possible states, each existing at the same time in some sense. However, measurements on quantum systems appear to cause an instantaneous and generally unpredictable "jump" to a single state of the system, which seems inconsistent with a smooth and continuous evolution.

The MWI gets around this "jump" by saying that all possible states in the superposition continue to exist, but in different universes, and we only "see" one universe.

"Gets around this" makes the MWI sound like a dodge, when in fact it is an explantion.

Now, this theory is not inconsistent with what we observe,

And is in fact consistent with everything we observe.

but it's also not really possible to test this theory, which is why many physicists (including myself) are sceptical, or simply don't think that seriously about it. I believe there are more practical and conventional ways of thinking about the issue of measurement.

In particular, there is a whole field of research associated with quantum measurement theory, which essentially starts from the Schroedinger equation and models the interaction of quantum systems with measurement devices. It is largely able to describe the effects of measurements in a consistent way and show how it is that the measured system "jumps" into a particular state.

Note that Scott has put quotes around the word "jump". This is because the hypothesized jump is instantaneous and unpredictable. The jump is furthermore undetectable: we never catch a system in the process of jumping. The quotes are around the word "jump" because Scott knows that the jump is not the type of physical jump we are all familiar with, which is not instantaneous, not unpredictable, and not undetectable. Scott's "jump" is instantaneous, unpredictable, and undetectable. Therefore Scott cannot in fact directly test this jump and must infer it indirectly, and this is, in principle, no different to the type of reasoning that Many Worlders use. The criticism that the MWI is untestable is therefore one that he cannot consistently maintain.

Scott's explanation is inferior to the MWI for a number of reasons, including the following:

1. It assumes that causality is instantaneous, even across light minutes. This violates relativity, not only the light-speed constraint, but also that there is no relativity of simultaneity: the jump is instantaneous in *all* reference frames.

2. It cannot explain the apparent randomness of the jump

3. It cannot explain what sort of reality a system has before measurement. Does he maintain that objects are actually in many states prior to measurement, or does he maintain that these states are just possibilities, one of which is actualized on measurement? Or are we just not supposed to ask the question? When the unseen entities passing through the apparatus in a single-photon interference experiment are found to have all the properties of a photon (see Deutsch quote in my previous comment), what are we to regard these as, if not photons?

Scott mentions that he doesn't think seriously about the MWI. I mentioned in my post that it was Deutsch's interest in the MWI that led him to discover universal quantum computers. If he had followed the counsel of pragmatists, then this discovery may never have happened.
brian s, yes I've read most of Greg Egan's work. He has some good material on his website as well.

And brian s, I also don't believe in quarks, so referring to that doesn't help :-)

I'm a realist when it comes to scientific theories and particles and while I find the multiple worlds theory entertaining, it doesn't rise above speculation.

On the slit experiment: there are perfectly valid other explanations. It's sad for the untold worlds which Occam's razor has to eliminate here, let's hope all those otherworldlings don't mind :-)
Brian S said...[Yes, and one of the papers I linked to in my original post entitled "100 Years of the Quantum" indicates that John Wheeler has finally come around and is now a Many Worlder.]

Where in that document that stated John Wheeler is now a Many Worlder? That document is about the development of Quantum Mechanics during last century and not about endorsing MWI. In that document it mentioned Prof. Anton Zeilinger who did lead the team to conduct the experiment for the confirmation of the 'non-local universe' plus the confirmation of the 'quantum teleportation phenomena'. If the document was about MWI, it wouldn't have mentioned Prof. Anton Zeilinger's name since all his work were done in the Copenhagen Interpretation framework. The document however did mention MWI of how it avoids paradoxes. That is why the document summarizes Quantum Mechanics over the last 100 years, because of its success (Copenhagen Interpretation) in its prediction capability, which has none so far that is found to be wrong to date. It wasn't a summary about MWI, since it has no single prediction plus, if it proposes some in the future, it will be UNTESTABLE.

John Wheeler is long known to be a critique of MWI even though Everret was his student. His opposition to MWI appeared in his paper, "Include the Observer in the Wave Function?".

Now, I have asked you a question (in fact, many questions), and it hasn't been answered. The question is, "Explain Quantum Teleportation of the type of experiment performed by Professor Anton Zeilinger and his team in terms of MWI perspective? ".
Dr. Scott Parkins said...[Now, this theory is not inconsistent with what we observe]

Brian S reply...[And is in fact consistent with everything we observe.]

Brian, I have already said this answer to you in the original 'Entropy' thread. Didn't you remember that? Why are you re-stating this again? Are you running out of points to fill in for the debate here? What I stated in that thread is that different formulations and interpretations of Quantum Mechanics could explain most things we observe, however, they are different in predictive power. TEW (Theory of Elementary Waves) does also explain most observations already established by Copenhagen Interpretation (CI). MWI does the same. The difference is that MWI & TEW have not proposed any predictions yet? Also most of the established CI derivations are not yet accounted for or explained in terms of MWI or TEW perpective. For example, was the derivation of "Quantum Squeezed States" (QSS) , in which I have asked you in a previous post to provide an explanation in terms of MWI perpective, and you haven't been able to provide one so far. You can ask Dr. Scott Parkins which is one of his research domain of interest to explain to you what it is and its technological application, which has been available for commercial use over recently times . In fact the Quantum Optic/Computing group at Auckland Physics Department, where Scott is a member, is a leader in QSS research, which they followed on from the pioneering work of late Prof. Daniel Walls, who proposed this phenomena in the 1980s. You can visit the Photonics lab at Auckland to see these fantastic state-of-the-art devices invented via the theoretical framework of the Copenhagen Interpretation.

Here is an article on the application of 'Quantum Squeezed State' soliton photon pulse, for high speed fibre-optic telecommunication network.

"Quantum solitons"http://physicsweb.org/articles/world/12/2/8/1

In the Photonics lab, there are lasers and fibre-optic for soliton transmission, if you're curious about these gadgets as a result of the Copenhagen Interpretation, just contact Scott or anyone from his group to go there and witness the predictive power of CI.
Brian,

Another question that I am still waiting for an explanation from you, but none so far, is for you to explain how the double-slit experiment is accounted for by MWI?

It would be nice if you answer some unanswered questions I have put forward to you in my previous posts, so that we can move forward in the debate. It looks like to me that you're evading. If you provide answers to outstanding questions, then I will then, able to come up with more questions to ask. It is hard to ask you more questions if the previous questions are still left unanswered.
Brian S said...[It assumes that causality is instantaneous, even across light minutes.]

You used the word 'assume', but ISN'T MWI does 'assume' there exist other universes?

Now, I've pointed you out to the Innsbruck double-delay-choice experiment which confirm non-local interaction of correlated particles. I have pointed out Prof. Prof. Anton Zeilinger's paper on 'Non-local Universe', which is the double-delay experiment.
Brian S said...[This violates relativity, not only the light-speed constraint, but also that there is no relativity of simultaneity: the jump is instantaneous in *all* reference frames.]

Now, perhaps this is the third time I've asked you this question, and I hope that answer this time.

How, does the Copenhagen Interpretation violate relativity? What condition(s) in relativity theory that is being violated?
FF,

I am not being evasive when I don't answer all of your questions: I simply don't have the time!

And given that I am short of time right now, I'll refer to you Alan Forrester's MWI explanation of teleportation on The Fabric of Reality list (this list has thousands of posts on the MWI and is an excellent resource). See also the Deutsch and Hayden paper which I have referred you to previously and for which the abstract follows:

All information in quantum systems is, notwithstanding Bell's theorem, localised. Measuring or otherwise interacting with a quantum system S has no effect on distant systems from which S is dynamically isolated, even if they are entangled with S. Using the Heisenberg picture to analyse quantum information processing makes this locality explicit, and reveals that under some circumstances (in particular, in Einstein-Podolski-Rosen experiments and in quantum teleportation) quantum information is transmitted through 'classical' (i.e. decoherent) information channels.

And if you pay attention to this paper it clearly explains why experiments like Zeilinger's are not demonstrations of non-locality. Non-locality is a non-explanation concocted by those determined to hold onto single-universe physics.

A star 10 light years away emits a photon. In the CI it spreads out as a kind of probability wave so that by the time it reachs Earth the wave is spread across a sphere 10 light years in diameter. When a human eye detects the photon, the wave instantaneously collapses across all those light years. So you have a spherical region of space 20 light years across that somehow "knows" straight away that the photon hit an eye. And even when we consider an observer moving relative to the eye, that observer does not notice any relativity of simultaneity of the collapse (the collapse is still simultaneous with the photon hitting the eye). What nonsense!

I don't believe in arguments by authority so it is neither here nor there what John Wheeler believes, but the Tegmark & Wheeler paper is mostly a discussion of the MWI and it is pretty clear that both authors are Many Worlders (and Max Tegmarks website has more multiverses than you can poke a stick at!). They conclude their main discussion with this:

"...we constantly keep entering into superpositions of different mental states, but decoherence prevents us from noticing this - subjectively we (all superposed versions of us) just perceive this as the slight randomness that disturbed Einstein so much"

How much more MWI can you get? This paper is a fairly recent paper so it is a pretty good indication of Wheeler's current position (though it is always hard to tell with him because he changes his mind so much!)
"10 light years in diameter"

um, radius.
I presume you created a Strawman there, Brian, in order to save time, but the following is nonsense:

'A star 10 light years away emits a photon. In the CI it spreads out as a kind of probability wave so that by the time it reachs Earth the wave is spread across a sphere 10 light years in diameter. When a human eye detects the photon, the wave instantaneously collapses across all those light years. So you have a spherical region of space 20 light years across that somehow "knows" straight away that the photon hit an eye. And even when we consider an observer moving relative to the eye, that observer does not notice any relativity of simultaneity of the collapse (the collapse is still simultaneous with the photon hitting the eye).'

There is no knowing here; it is just the way observation works in regard to indeterministic systems.

Also, for someone who disdains appeals to authority you really should get off your high horse about Deutsch.
Brian S said...[See also the Deutsch and Hayden paper which I have referred you to previously and for which the abstract follows:]

I have to ask if you , yourself paid any attention to that paper at all? Can I ask you to stop quoting papers for the sake of quoting them, because obviously, you don't pay attention to them.

Did you notice the date of publication of the paper? Here is a clue for you, go over the link I have shown you in this thread and find the link for the Innsbruck double-delay choice paper and compare the 2 papers date of publications. You will be surprised to find out that David Deutsch's paper went to publication at around the same time as the Innsbruck paper. What does that mean? It means that Deutsch, had not had a chance to inspect the Innsbruck paper, which might force him to change the content of his paper. Why would he have done that? Because , on the face of experimental evidence, you just do not simply look away and ignore facts. This happens most of the time in science.

Here is an example of a Physicist (David Harriman) who was a strong proponent of TEW (Theory of Elementary Waves) interpretation of Quantum Mechanics until he became aware of the 'Innsbruck Double-delay Choice' experiment in the late 1990s. The Innsbruck experiment established once and for all that non-local interaction (a.k.a Non-Local Universe) DOES indeed exist. David Harriman did abandon his support for TEW, simply because he couldn't ignore scientific facts. TEW & MWI are both local theories.

You can read about his withdrawal of supporting TEW here:

"Statement on the Theory of Elementary Waves"http://www.objectivescience.com/articles/dh_tew.htm

Brian, I am sick of repeating myself to you and I hope that I don't have to explain this to you again, because I had already mentioned this very clearly in the 'Entropy' thread, about the almost simultaneous publication of Deutsch's paper & the Innsbruck's paper. That is Deutsch was not even aware of the experimental facts, where his paper was trying to debunk Bell's Theorem as myth. After all, the confirmation of non-locality where Bell's Theorem was violated by the Innsbruck team is no myth, but facts. Indeed, MWI is the myth, because it is UNTESTABLE.
Brian S said...[Non-locality is a non-explanation concocted by those determined to hold onto single-universe physics.]

No, those who are determined to hold on to single-universe physics are from the majority of the Physics research community and have formed well-established foundations of understanding in theoretical physics. MWI is a minority group which had none whatsoever proposed any PREDICTIONS yet. It has not made any contribution to real world technologies yet after 50 years when it was first proposed. Its only hope is Quantum computers, but CI (Quantum Mechanics) is on a fast track to built the first quantum computer, which would likely to beat the MWI proponents. This is true where proto-types had been built at US government Nuclear facility, Los Alamos in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Here are some questions that you might want to answer.

#1) How, do the many universes interact?

#2) If they do interact, then how often?

#3) How many universes can interact simultaneously?

#4) What makes those universes parallel?

#5) Do the objects from our universe disappear to the other universes?

#6) Do those universes occupy the same space?

Brian, can you give answers to those questions above?
Brian S said...[How much more MWI can you get? This paper is a fairly recent paper so it is a pretty good indication of Wheeler's current position (though it is always hard to tell with him because he changes his mind so much!)]

That John Wheeler & Max Tegmarks paper is an essay and not a peer review one. It was written for the Scientific American magazine.

You know and I know, that peer review papers have more weight than essays or articles written for the general public print media such as Scientific American or newspapers. So, the Wheeler & Tegmarks paper has no weight (in fact zero), at all in its content, to make Many Worlder be in the same par as the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.
Brian, here is a quote from Alan Forrester's page:

Alan Forrester said...[If you measure a sharp observable then you get the same result across all universes (barring faults in the measuring device). What happens if you measure an unsharp observable? Well, before the measurement there is only one version of the measuring device, afterward there are two versions in parallel universes, each one of which records one of the possible measurement results.]

Does a specific universe split into 2 or more as quoted by Alan in his message above? If it does indeed split into 2 everytime a measurement is made, then this is a direct contradiction to a previous post where you said, that universes don't split but they differentiate?

Which is the correct answer Brian? Is it SPLITTING or DIFFERENTIATION? Or perhaps that you, yourself are also lost in the language interpretation of MWI?
FF,

Did you split into multiple versions, each of which is posting here?

I don't know why you keep saying Zeilinger's results refutes the Deutsch and Hayden paper. It doesn't. Just the opposite. It is confirmation of the MWI view, as Frank Tipler explains here:

Abstract:Quantum nonlocality may be an artifact of the assumption that observers obey the laws of classical mechanics, while observed systems obey quantum mechanics. I show that, at least in the case of Bell's Theorem, locality is restored if observed and observer are both assumed to obey quantum mechanics, as in the Many-Worlds Interpretation. Using the MWI, I shall show that the apparently "non-local" expectation value for the product of the spins of two widely separated particles --- the "quantum" part of Bell's Theorem --- is really due to a series of three purely local measurements. Thus, experiments confirming "nonlocality" are actually confirming the MWI.

Anyway, I'm feeling more and more like one of the gun-slingers in PC's cartoon, so I'm going to leave the discussion for now.

Your six questions are good questions and I suggest you post them to the Fabric of Reality list where I'm sure you will receive some very reasonable answers.
I probably shouldn't wade in here, but it is nice to see this topic being discussed on a New Zealand oriented site, simply because, academically speaking, there are some fine minds in this country when it comes to research into fundamental quantum physics, and it would be nice if that translated into wider public interest.

Disclaimer: I'm a Quantum Physics PhD who has published work with Rainer Leonhardt and Scott Parkins mentioned in comments above. Specifically, my own work could be said to err more towards supporting the notion that interaction with the outisde world is the only thing that's needed to explain the quantum measurement problem away... Having said that, the Many Worlds Interpretation is still an interpretation rather than a theory with new, testable predictions as far as I'm aware so I'm really no more qualified than anyone else or for that matter any more biased by my use of established quantum theory when it comes to commenting on this stuff.

I have a few points to make:

1) The "Many worlds interpretation" is still called an interpretation. Is anyone aware of any specific predicitions that Many Worlds theory makes which are outside of standard quantum theory? In this case there might be hope for confirming it one way or another...

I seem to recall that some (perhaps prominent?) physicists have said that a successful quantum computer would force people to believe the many worlds theory because, well, that super-classical computing power must be coming from somewhere , the idea being that we share the possible computing power of a huge number of somehow existent universes when we use a quantum computer. Personally I still don't find this convincing. From a very utilitarian point of view, that computing power arises because nature, as embodied in the laws of quantum mechanics, allows it to occur. quantum mechanics just works that way and that's that. The reason people are groping for interpretations is because they find it difficult to form a clear, intuitive picture of the natural process that is occuring, unlike in classical mechanics where little balls colliding with each other is to a crude degree all the mental imagery you'll ever need ;). But an interpretation is just window dressing until it actually leads to intuition which makes NEW predicitions. Smarter people than me are backing many worlds, but I'd like to know if they've made any progress on the prediciton front.

2) I always thought that the most compelling reason for being suspicious of MWI was Occam's razor which states that given the infinite possible explanations that one can give for a physical phenomenon, the simplest possible explanation (that is the one with the fewest parameters) should be preferred. Many worlds multiplies Universes ad infinitum just so we can have a cosy mental picture of the natural processes described by QM. A lot of people think that this is a dear price to pay! This is a capitalist oriented site right. So do you really think that Nature would be this wasteful of resources when cleaner, more efficient single universe models can explain things just as well? ;););) (Of course, the point is that some people think that ONLY MWI can explain all the observed phenomena in which case it doesn't matter how "wasteful" it seems, because it's the only game in town.)

Another way to look at it is through the testability lens which a lot of people have also brought up. If you claim that there are multitudinous other universes which are created by quantum "splitting" or "differentiation" events but, oh hang on, you can't ever reach them or even feel their influence except via a rather unspectacular interference experiment, why should I believe you? People who do believe such things are, for example, good candidates for believing that there is a very specific God in Heaven - a bearded man in the Judeo-Christian tradition for example, exactly as described in the bible. While we have no real evidence of such specifics, believers might say, if exactly such a god did exist it explains a few things about the world. Well perhaps, but why believe all these things that you can't verify along with the very general idea of a creator which does not imply any specific form for god. =>Do we really have to swallow a multiverse teeming with infinite slightly differentiated universes all equally "real" just to explain the quantum measurement problem? Are there leaner versions of many worlds without infinite versions of each of us floating around in them?

(3) Remember that Physicists don't have to buy into any interpretation of quantum mechanics to use it effectively. In a comment above, Brian S took Scott Parkins' to task about a quantum jump "interpretation". But I don't think Scott was using any interpretation. The jump issue in quantum mechanics, or the collapse of the wavefunction, ra, ra, ra, whatever you wish to call it, is I think the bare minimum theory needed to predict naturally observable events. I don't agree that there is any interpretation going on here. The facts are that when you look at the distribution of photons from a slit experiment on a detector screen, each one makes a "dot" at just one point - that's your measurement. To describe the distriution of points you use quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics describes the photon as a "delocalised" or non-pointlike entity - a wave as such which gives the requisite interference pattern. It also provides a probabalistic rule telling you how likely a given measurement is given the form of this wave. What you do to connect the wave model of the pre-measurement photon to the measurement you actually make - your interpretation of the observed physical phenomenon - is up to you, but it doesn't change the basic description of what happens which is standard quantum mechanics.

Some rather vocal proponents of the decoherence project think that they've got the quantum measurement problem - jumps and all - ironed out by just considering the interaction of a closed quantum system with it's environment. I favour decoherence myself (remember I'm biased - I invoke it a little in my thesis) because it seems clean. The idea is that the idea is that the nice probability waves that don't have any particular "position" are in reality rapidly converted into particular "classical" states in any real system because there is interaction with the environment. I don't think many people believe that decoherence theory is enough to explain the measurement problem away completely, but it IS a theory and it does help make sense of certain experimental observations to some degree. Personally, decoherence looks to me like Quantum Mechanics without the difficult jump, but with the Born Rule explained (see W. H. Zurek, Probabilities from envariancerd, eprint quant-ph/0405161 (2004) - still controversial!!!) and no multiple Universes required. Reading the recent Wheeler preprint ("100 Years of the quantum") referenced in a comment above (Brian S again?) the Decoherence theory is in fact presented as being an important addition to Everett's many worlds theory and not an explanation in competition with it. I am not convinced after a cursory review of that paper that there is really anything left to explain if decoherence works as well as Tegmark and Wheeler imply in this preprint, but even so the "Many Worlds" they describe does not seem as grandiose as the usual idea of infinite simultaneously exisiting Universes being almost identical to our own. Rather, a far more subtle "Many Minds" idea is suggested which seems rather different to me, or at least is far less suggestive in a sci fi sense.

Okay sorry to go on an on. Maybe my over all point is that Many Worlds Interpretation seems to excite a lot of people, when it's really a subtle idea and refinement might remove a lot of the sci fi elements of it, if it even survives as an attempt to provide a picture of the undoubtedly successful quantum mechanical laws. It seems to me that the successful implementation of Shor's algorithm alone is not enough to irrefutably prove the existence of multiple "mes" in Universes which I can never otherwise observe the effect of.

As a final note, I attended the Quantum Physics of Nature last year and saw Zeilinger's labs in Vienna. Very nice! I also heard debates about precisely this stuff and I can assure you that the physics community is nowhere near a consensus...
Brian,

Are you taking Professor. J. Tipler seriously? Prof Tipler who comes out with weird idea such as 'The Anthropic Principles' ?

"The Anthropic Coincidences"http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/stenger_intel.html

I suspect that it won't be too long , Professor Tipler would declare that GOD exist? It has been reported in some articles on the internet, that Tipler himself had indicated indirectly in an interview that he is not ruling out the existence of a grandmaster designer. Does this familiar to you? He is stop short of endorsing 'Intelligent Designer'.

Now, the Non-local test conducted by Zeilinger , et al, was based on the well established BELL theoretical framework. Note that there is no such framework in MWI , where its falsification could be tested on. If Bell is violated, then non-locality interaction does indeed exist. That is why it stands up. You can't falsify something by just throwing in arbitrary. As I recalled PC, saying that Ayn Rand stated that if there is no proof, then the arbitrary claim has to be thrown out, no ifs no buts, just out. That is exactly what happens to MWI? It has no framework established that it can be tested on its validity. MWI is UNTESTABLE.

BTW, I fired an email to David Deutsch, asking if MWI had proposed any predictions yet and he said, that it is impossible at present to test. I have also sent 2 emails to Frank Tipler asking to state the predictions proposed by MWI if any. He never replied back.

MWI does come and try to give explanations to Physics formulations that are already known. It was 'Born Probabiliy' , then 'Non-Locality' and so forth, BUT it has not propose anything new so that researchers will hone their target (research subject) into and find out if such physical entity or action does indeed allowable in nature. So, MWI is more like when someone has eaten his meal (dinner, etc), and the left-overs would be cleaned up by the beggars. Beggars don't produce anything original, they only come afterwards, to clean up the leftovers put aside to them by the wealthy producers.
Mark Sadgrove said...[I'm a Quantum Physics PhD who has published work with Rainer Leonhardt and Scott Parkins mentioned in comments above.]

Mark , Welcome. Perhaps, that your long comment be re-posted by PC (owner of the blog) as Part 2. I suspect that PC, will come out with an article of his own, in terms of philosophical implications of Quantum Mechanics, perhaps part 2, if your very nice post is not to be made as part 2, then PC can post his one as part 3.

I was at the Department as well in the mid-1990s, and late Professor Dan Walls & Prof. Mathew Collete were the lecturers for Quantum Mechanics. Prof. Leonhardt & Prof. Harvey were the ones teaching 'Opto-Electronics'. Dr. Bold's son (Geoff) was in the same class as me.

I guess that I will see you at the 'inaugural symposium of the Dodd-Walls Centre for Photonics and Ultra Cold Atoms' , next Saturday week , that is 9 December.

I might try & spot you for a chat.
Mark,

Why should I believe you are conscious? After all, the only consciousness I ever experience is my own and I cannot experience your consciousness. Isn't believing in billions of other consciousnesses just to explain the reality of my own perceptions wasteful? Surely nature is much more parsimonious?

FF,

I'm well aware of Frank Tipler's stranger theories, but he would hardly be the first scientist to believe in a creator. I cite him because I think that his point about non-locality is correct. Arguments need to be taken on a case-by-case basis, for a man who is wrong about many things can be right about some things.

BTW - The multiverse considered as a whole is a much much simpler thing than any particular universe and in fact contains zero net information.
Brian,

In one of your post, you've stated that Copenhagen Interpretation violates Relativity Theory.

Now, I think that this is the fourth time I have asked you to explain this violation, and again you have evaded giving an answer .

First, I suspect that the reason you don't want to answer is that you DON'T know. You might have read some books where it mentioned the "superluminal" (faster than speed of light), where you JUMPED and think "AHA" , Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics violates one of the conditions of Theory of Relativity.

I want to state this very important quote to you, and perhaps you then bloody answer my question and stop evading.

"Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics DOES NOT violate any of the Theory of Relativity proposals"

You've have stated before in NotPC that you have a background in Signal Processing. So, I will give you some hints if your Signal Processing lecturer didn't give you enough information on WAVE PROPAGATION.

Brian, if your former Signal Processing lecturer didn't teach you point #1 , then I urge you put a fill-in a claim form and demand that part of your fees for the course be refunded because he/she didn't teach you the principles of WAVE PROPAGATIONS. This is just Physics 101.
FF,

I have explained the point several times now. You believe in an instantaneous, undetectable, and unpredictable collapse. That not only violates relativity, it violates common sense. Now I know Copenhagenists claim that because no energy, information, or matter is transfered during the collapse, relativity is not violated (and we can only learn about collapse after the fact by good old classical processes). But think about it: you're basically postulating a magical process to get around explaining anything. You may as well put God in the equation.
Do you think, in these other universes that the 'Borg' would have a dominate role in intergalatic affairs?
Anonymous said...[Do you think, in these other universes that the 'Borg' would have a dominate role in intergalatic affairs?]

I think that if there is such a thing as Borg in other universes then those Borgs and those universes are only imaginary and not real ones.
What about the 'Clingon Empire' then- their political ideology of world and/or universe domination is well documented.
Anon said...[What about the 'Clingon Empire'?]

May be that's the empire that Tom Cruise and the Church of Scientology are members of.
Everyone knows- the Church of Scientology do not accept the 'Many Worlds, Interpretation' per se, but take a more broader view to the 'Chewbecca' theory of relativity.
Anyone still reading this thread? I just noticed a brief chat with David Deutsch posted on the New Scientist site (the Woman's Weekly of science publications eh?) The link is:here

Deutsch is obviously a REALLY smart guy and I find his arguments stimulating and his criticism of the utilitarian approach to physics rather trenchant (I guess I effectively promoted this approach in my first post). But damned if I still don't feel CONVINCED by his argument about the power of quantum computers proving many worlds. I won't feel convinced ever, in fact, unless someone can provide me MATERIAL proof (or similar) of those worlds. The existence of some large calculating resource outside of our universe is very different (to me at least) to the idea of multiple universes populated with multiple you-and-is. I feel compelled to be cynical about such an idea from the core of my scientific cynicism... but then why doesn't a smart guy like David Deutsch I wonder?

Brian S, as for your comment about the consciousness of others, well perhaps we can agree that, apart from all the emotional stuff that makes me regard others as conscious like myself, from a rational viewpoint, the consciousness of others will always remain a (very useful) hypothesis which we will never be able to verify directly. I don't really think that's solipsism just a brutal fact. But to boil down your argument to it's point, perhaps it's more illuminating to ask why nature bothers to be anything at all... I mean apart from doubting the existence of others, I should perhaps doubt the existence of my physical body (clearly unecessary and wasteful merely to create the perception of a physical body which I experience) etc etc, and in fact even the existence of a coherent, enduring "I" seems doubtable. But I think that you interpret my Occam's Razor argument as a solipsist sort of argument. My point was that given what we observe in nature, the Many Worlds Interpretation seems to require a lot more resources to explain the observations than interpretations such as Copenhagen or (pushing it) Decoherence. Now maybe I'm just a utilitarian without the mental muscle/intellectual courage to require that Science explain the world as Deutsch requires. Certainly, Deutch's requirement that physics be about the real world rather than just a set of equations used for prediction resonates with me, as you'd hope it resonates with any inquisitive person. Nonetheless, I think that in the end, one must balance scepticism against the will to explain. And furthermore, there are many different levels of explanation. A completely utilitarian scientist (that is one who does not believe that science is describing the world as it really is but rather believes that science is a just set of tools to make predictions about the world which is refined according to the scientific method of hypothesis testing) will still start to inhabit the theories they work with and gain an intuition about a theory's workings, form mental pictures of the theory and, yes, start to ascribe the status of a description of reality to this theory. I don't think you can be a pure utilitarian as a scientist - the will to explain naturally leads you to connect your equation with reality. And this is an important part of the scientific process - something that one can't imagine today's computers doing for example, even though they could in principle carry out hypothesis testing which is the basis of science.

Again, I'm being long winded, but my point is that most scientist's in my opinion are neither complete logical positivists of David Deutsch's ilk or utter utilitarians.

Briefly, a spontaneous collapse is not described by quantum mechanics. There is just a rule giving probablities for a certain result. It's true that until you apply this rule you use Schrodinger's equation to evolve the system deterministically, and for practical purposes you take the time at which you stop using the SE and apply the rule to be exactly when you choose to make the measurement. In Decoherence theory, the actual collapse takes a finite (but extremely brief) time. In any case, as others have pointed out, I don't see the relativity busting superluminal flow of information going on here even if the collapse is instantaneous.

Anyway, the discussions here seem really sophisticated and often hard for me to follow. Out of interest how many people here have spent time learning physics or philosphy at Uni? Obviously neither is a requirement for having good insight into this issue. Perhaps an impedement, ha ha! I would love to hear what the real smarties in my old department have to say on this issue though!

Best,Mark S.

P.S. FF - I live and research in Tokyo now so I couldn't make it to the Dodd Walls symposium. How was it?
Because test aren't currently technically feasible, doesn't mean that something can never be tested. GR couldn't be fully tested until relatively recently (and further tests are being dreamed up even now to test it further to smaller scales). The tests that have been put forward with respect to the MWI (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-manyworlds/#5)aren't currently feasible, but for the most part they only entail progress on the engineering side -- there aren't issues of principle. Time will tell.
For much more on Prof. Frank J. Tipler and God, see Tipler's below paper, which among other things demonstrates that the known laws of physics (i.e., the Second Law of Thermodynamics, general relativity, quantum mechanics, and the Standard Model of particle physics) require that the universe end in the Omega Point (the final cosmological singularity and state of infinite informational capacity identified as being God):

Out of 50 articles, Prof. Tipler's above paper was selected as one of 12 for the "Highlights of 2005" accolade as "the very best articles published in Reports on Progress in Physics in 2005 [Vol. 68]. Articles were selected by the Editorial Board for their outstanding reviews of the field. They all received the highest praise from our international referees and a high number of downloads from the journal Website." (See Richard Palmer, Publisher, "Highlights of 2005," Reports on Progress in Physics. http://www.iop.org/EJ/journal/-page=extra.highlights/0034-4885 ) Reports on Progress in Physics is the leading journal of the Institute of Physics, Britain's main professional body for physicists.

See also the below resources for further information on the Omega Point Theory:

Tipler is Professor of Mathematics and Physics (joint appointment) at Tulane University. His Ph.D. is in the field of global general relativity (the same rarefied field that Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking developed), and he is also an expert in particle physics and computer science. His Omega Point Theory has been published in a number of prestigious peer-reviewed physics and science journals in addition to Reports on Progress in Physics, such as Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (one of the world's leading astrophysics journals), Physics Letters B, the International Journal of Theoretical Physics, etc.

Prof. John A. Wheeler (the father of most relativity research in the U.S.) wrote that "Frank Tipler is widely known for important concepts and theorems in general relativity and gravitation physics" on pg. viii in the "Foreword" to The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (1986) by cosmologist Prof. John D. Barrow and Tipler, which was the first book wherein Tipler's Omega Point Theory was described.

The leading quantum physicist in the world, Prof. David Deutsch (inventor of the quantum computer, being the first person to mathematically describe the workings of such a device, and winner of the Institute of Physics' 1998 Paul Dirac Medal and Prize for his work), endorses the physics of the Omega Point Theory in his book The Fabric of Reality (1997). For that, see

The only way to avoid the Omega Point cosmology is to invent tenuous physical theories which have no experimental support and which violate the known laws of physics, such as with Prof. Stephen Hawking's paper on the black hole information issue which is dependant on the conjectured string theory-based anti-de Sitter space/conformal field theory correspondence (AdS/CFT correspondence). See S. W. Hawking, "Information loss in black holes," Physical Review D, Vol. 72, No. 8, 084013 (October 2005); also at arXiv:hep-th/0507171, July 18, 2005. http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0507171

That is, Hawking's paper is based upon proposed, unconfirmed physics. It's an impressive testament to the Omega Point Theory's correctness, as Hawking implicitly confirms that the known laws of physics require the universe to collapse in finite time. Hawking realizes that the black hole information issue must be resolved without violating unitarity, yet he's forced to abandon the known laws of physics in order to avoid unitarity violation without the universe collapsing.

Some have suggested that the universe's current acceleration of its expansion obviates the universe collapsing (and therefore obviates the Omega Point). But as Profs. Lawrence M. Krauss and Michael S. Turner point out in "Geometry and Destiny" (General Relativity and Gravitation, Vol. 31, No. 10 [October 1999], pp. 1453-1459; also at arXiv:astro-ph/9904020, April 1, 1999 http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9904020 ), there is no set of cosmological observations which can tell us whether the universe will expand forever or eventually collapse.

There's a very good reason for that, because that is dependant on the actions of intelligent life. The known laws of physics provide the mechanism for the universe's collapse. As required by the Standard Model, the net baryon number was created in the early universe by baryogenesis via electroweak quantum tunneling. This necessarily forces the Higgs field to be in a vacuum state that is not its absolute vacuum, which is the cause of the positive cosmological constant. But if the baryons in the universe were to be annihilated by the inverse of baryogenesis, again via electroweak quantum tunneling (which is allowed in the Standard Model, as B - L is conserved), then this would force the Higgs field toward its absolute vacuum, cancelling the positive cosmological constant and thereby forcing the universe to collapse. Moreover, this process would provide the ideal form of energy resource and rocket propulsion during the colonization phase of the universe.

Prof. Tipler's above Reports on Progress in Physics paper also demonstrates that the correct quantum gravity theory has existed since 1962, first discovered by Richard Feynman in that year, and independently discovered by Steven Weinberg and Bryce DeWitt, among others. But because these physicists were looking for equations with a finite number of terms (i.e., derivatives no higher than second order), they abandoned this qualitatively unique quantum gravity theory since in order for it to be consistent it requires an arbitrarily higher number of terms. Further, they didn't realize that this proper theory of quantum gravity is consistent only with a certain set of boundary conditions imposed (which includes the initial Big Bang, and the final Omega Point, cosmological singularities). The equations for this theory of quantum gravity are term-by-term finite, but the same mechanism that forces each term in the series to be finite also forces the entire series to be infinite (i.e., infinities that would otherwise occur in spacetime, consequently destabilizing it, are transferred to the cosmological singularities, thereby preventing the universe from immediately collapsing into nonexistence). As Tipler notes in his 2007 book The Physics of Christianity (pp. 49 and 279), "It is a fundamental mathematical fact that this [infinite series] is the best that we can do. ... This is somewhat analogous to Liouville's theorem in complex analysis, which says that all analytic functions other than constants have singularities either a finite distance from the origin of coordinates or at infinity."

When combined with the Standard Model, the result is a Theory of Everything (TOE) correctly describing and unifying all the forces in physics.
A billion dollar bedpan?
Indeed. Though the Cake Tin proves that the water front idea can succeed. But a ben pan? Wtf? Personally I'd like to see whatever stadium we make be NZ's first large one with a roof that is closable, but open by default, like some overseas ones. But mainly, as you say, something of more value.

The world just doesn't have enought, Roarks does it, PC? I know nothing about how to construct a building, about architecture, but most "architects" know less than me when it comes to how a building ought to look, i.e., the Roark way, i.e., functional to their purpose. And a little sense of taste and value would be nice, too. No I haven't read the full of that book yet (I am reading others of hers first), but I intend to. So far I only read the excerpt from The Ayn Rand Sampler that the ARI sent me when I registered online.
Oh, and I also think it should be funded by corporations and investors that want to invest in it, not the government choosing to spend our money on it!

Why do we not have any shares that the government uses our money to create. I don't remember once getting any dividends from Kiwibank, the government's power station, or TVNZ. Or being able to sell my stake in the "people's bank" so that I can make profit from them. What about you? ;-)
Kane..I just couldn't put The Fountainhead down, I read it in 3 days....but that is another story.

As for the bedpan, I thought it looked like one of those old tyres that old people painted white. They planted marigolds and parsley in them, garnished with a with a few painted rocks. There was a time when this was en-vogue - cough!
I've been waiting for one of the photoshoppers to tack a toilet lid to it!

Sort of represents what they are doing with our money...
If it's such a stupid idea then Dick Hubbard wouldn't support it.

Doh!

It's seriously stupid.

BTW: The Cake Tin is not the same as it does not stick out into the harbour and disrupt sightlines in the way this monstrosity will. It's not the concept of a stadium by the city that's stupid, it's having one screw up the harbour & waterfront. If that space is to be used for a public facilty make it something that is not inward focused like a stadium.
should we be hosting the rugby world cup alone? are we trying to punch above our weight?"The Cake Tin is not the same as it does not stick out into the harbour and disrupt sightlines in the way this monstrosity will."

That's it. The Cake Tin sits over the road from a fairly quiet port, not right smack in the middle of NZ's hardest-working port.

And from the outside, it really ain't pretty.
I know these questions were probably rhetorical, but we have politicians who don't think so.

"Should we be hosting the rugby world cup alone?"

Probably not.

"Are we trying to punch above our weight?"

Yep. Sure are.
So Wellington has the cake tin and Auckland will get the bed pan. I know which I would rather sit inside.
Rebel Radius, I intend to read the Fountainhead yet, but I intend to. I want to read The Virtue of Selfishness, Capitalism, The Unknown Ideal, and Atlas Shrugged first.

Three days? I couldn't usually manage that unless it's a small book. Mind you, I read Phantom, book 10 of the Sword of Truth series, in 2 days and that is a almost 600 page hard cover book.

I don't know about what tires you refer too.

Oswald, that is funny.

Robin, I know it's not the same and that the two are very different. The point was that a harbour one can work if done right, i.e., the cake tin way, i.e. NOT the way of this one, even the new model ( which doesn't look like a bed pan. Instead it looks like two pet bowls stacked up, with the bottom of the top one removed.) In short the differences you pointed out are a part of what I was elluding too.

This whole stadium thing proves we are not well equipped mentally to host the World Cup. The main considerations are the waterfront one and Eden Park when they should be the Carlaw Park or North Harbour ones. If it wasn't for that we'd be able to host it. But because of that we aren't ready.
Humour for lexophiles
What 'everybody knows' about Tuvalu
Here's another classic media cock up with respect to 'global warming'.

Los Angeles Times, Sunday, June 25, 2006 an Article entitled "Greenland's Ice Sheet Is Slip-Sliding Away" The subtitle said, "The massive glaciers are deteriorating twice as fast as they were five years ago. If the ice thaws entirely, sea level would rise 21 feet." It is true that sea levels would rise a lot if all the ice melted. However, what the article does not tell you is that overall, ice on Greenland is accumulating - not melting. The December, 2005 Journal of Glaciology article indicates thawing along the coasts in the amount of –42 Gt a–1, although the increase inland of +53 Gt a–1 more than makes up for that loss. So, overall, ice is actually accumulating on Greenland at +11 Gt a–1 and not contributing to the global sea level rise at all!
Indeed, P-Style, Greenland IS gaining ice overall, which is not consistent with global warming. They also get it wrong about Antartica, which is also gaining overall. Some of the peninshulas may be falling away, but overall, it is gaining ice.

Besides, while NZ summers seems hotter and drier like global warming claims, our winters seem colder and wetter, whci is contradictory to global warming. Also our snow is lasting latter into spring every year. That is NOT consistent with global warming at all.

What we have is that globally the temperature is in flux, but that is just part of the natural flow of the climate, not man induced.
Global warming: "...a god-send for politicians"Why do so many politicians want to so much to insist upon a scientific consensus over global warming when that consensus just doesn't exist?

But it does.

All these organisations agree that Climate Change is a problem...

* Academia Brasiliera de Ciências (Bazil)* Royal Society of Canada* Chinese Academy of Sciences* Academié des Sciences (France)* Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina (Germany)* Indian National Science Academy* Accademia dei Lincei (Italy)* Science Council of Japan* Russian Academy of Sciences* Royal Society (United Kingdom)* National Academy of Sciences (United States of America)* Australian Academy of Sciences* Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Sciences and the Arts* Caribbean Academy of Sciences* Indonesian Academy of Sciences* Royal Irish Academy* Academy of Sciences Malaysia* Academy Council of the Royal Society of New Zealand* Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences* NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS)* National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)* National Academy of Sciences (NAS)* State of the Canadian Cryosphere (SOCC)* Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)* Royal Society of the United Kingdom (RS)* American Geophysical Union (AGU)* National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)* American Meteorological Society (AMS)* Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society

Now, admittedly, many scientists disagree with the views of their peers, and that is normal, and to be expected. It doesn't however, change the fact that the consensus view is that Climage Change exists.

As per the linked-to wikipedia article on 'consensus': "In the ideal case, those who wish to take up some action want to hear those who oppose it, because they count on the fact that the ensuing debate will improve the consensus. In theory, action without resolution of considered opposition will be rare and done with attention to minimize damage to relationships."
Of course climate change exists. But 'climate change' is not synonymous with 'global warming'. And I'm old enough to remember my science teachers categorically stating that we were 100,000 yrs overdue for another Ice Age.

They're the same ones who changed direction in the blink of an eye ...

The real question is how many of those organisations are publicly-funded?

Follow the (public) money - particularly where politicians are concerned.But 'climate change' is not synonymous with 'global warming'.

Okay then, 'climate change caused by human activities is a reality.'

The real question is how many of those organisations are publicly-funded?

And how many of the skeptics are funded by oil companies and large industry?

Surely, in most cases, scientists have to be funded by someone? Are all scientists biased towards the views of their paymasters? Both NOAA and NASA receive funding from the US Government, which, until very recently, has totally denied the existence of Global Warming. Surely taking such an unpopular view would result in them losing funding (which may actually be the case, but that's another story). Why would they take such an unpopular take on the issue if it wasn't something they actually believed in?

They're the same ones who changed direction in the blink of an eye ...

Consensus can change. Let's hope, in this case, that it does. I can't see, however, why taking steps that will lessen potential damage to the environment is a bad thing either way.
Hemi, heaps of people agreeing it exists doesn't make it true. Reality defines what is true not the consensus.

You should watch the Penn & Teller's Bullshit episode about global warming and why it is Bullshit with a capital B. Actually make that the whole word being capital.

There is also The Science of Discworld, which has a chapter on why global warming is rubbish and non-existant.

Also a lot of those are government ones, so they are hardly reliable. The exact reverse in fact.

Besides most species can survive external temperatures of well above 10 degrees Celcius above the norm, so it is nowhere near a catastrophe yet. especially since is is "BULLSHIT".

Sus, you are right that climate change and climate and global warming are not the same. Creatures throughtout history have survived the fact that this planet's natural changes of the climate.

Hemi, there is NO hard evidence, no proof that stands up to rational analysis that supports your claim that it is a reality. And since rationality is the recognising of reality it can never be wrong, thus proving the porrf wrong, thus showing global warming "experts" aren't, thus making global warming a thing we cannot rationally believe in.

Most of the sceptics aren't. I know Penn and Teller aren't. They're funded by Hollywood, which isn't exactly the biggest carbon dioxide emitter. Then their are people like myself, my cousin, PC, and Sus that don't have any funding, but yet realise the truth by looking at reality through rational analysis, which is the only way to see reality at all.

Also NASA and co believing in it doesn't prove anything. Reality isn't decided by belief. It is decided by reality.

As for how it is bad thing, how about the crippling effect it will have on the economy. Since we rely on the economy to survive, we'd be crippling our means of survival. Do you want to see deaths on a greater scale than during the Great Depression? Because that is what will happen if global warming alarmists happen. We'll have the greatest depression we've ever seen. In fact we'll return to the bad old pre-industralism days were survival was a lot harder. Coincidently socialism and statism is taking us that way anyway, as Ayn rand's Atlas Shrugged illustrates. But global warming alarmists would speed that up.
Hemi, you answered your own question .. yes, publicly-funded organisations changing their tune in order to not lose funding.

No argument with your last sentiment, per se. The argument is with having those steps *forced* upon us by politicians using dubious 'science'.

And you better believe I'm dubious where the UN's concerned - because as Monckton quotes Chirac: it's less about saving the planet than 'creating world govt'.

*That's* the issue. That's why politicians are hell-bent on using this.Hemi, heaps of people agreeing it exists doesn't make it true. Reality defines what is true not the consensus.

But consensus gives us the starting point for what to investigate, and the areas that are generally agreed upon. A lot of modern science is entirely based upon agreement amongst people rather than the 'reality'. At either end of the physical size scale, cosmology and quantum physics are often based on assumptions that are worked and reworked as more investigation is done. The 'reality' of either is unlikely to ever be known to us, so we do just ignore those aspects of our physical existence, or just try our best to get a better incomplete understanding through further research, always knowing that we will never be able to know the 'reality'.

Also a lot of those are government ones, so they are hardly reliable. The exact reverse in fact.

Eh? I thought we'd been over that. Why are government funded scientific studies any less reliable than those funded by large industry?

Hemi, there is NO hard evidence, no proof that stands up to rational analysis that supports your claim that it is a reality.

But there is. Read the IPCC report. Read the dozens of articles published by scientists who study this stuff. How much 'hard' evidence do you need? It's getting hotter, as predicted. How much hotter before it becomes a 'reality'?

Besides most species can survive external temperatures of well above 10 degrees Celcius above the norm, so it is nowhere near a catastrophe yet.

Well, probably yes, but so what? A 10 degree change in temperature would have accomanying changes to climate and coastlines that would be disastrous to the world economy. It's all very well surviving as a species, but not if it means decades of upheaval as the world's mostly coastline based larger cities start to have problems staying above water.

Do you want to see deaths on a greater scale than during the Great Depression?

Ahaha. You live in your reality, I'll live in mine.

Hemi, you answered your own question .. yes, publicly-funded organisations changing their tune in order to not lose funding.

But the opposite was true. NOAA and NASA took a line that was contrary to what their government was saying. Only recently has the government come into line with what the scientists were saying all along.

The argument is with having those steps *forced* upon us by politicians using dubious 'science'.

Was is the science so 'dubious'? Seriously, dozens of the world's pre-eminent scientific organisations (as listed above) endorse the theory of Global Warming. Many have published articles and papers stating so.

Again, I'm not saying the overwhelming consensus that currently supports Global Warming might not be overthrown by an alternate view, but current evidence and theory points to this being an incredibly big problem for humanity (and not in an 'end-of-the-world' way, just a 'having-to-deal-with' way).

A handful of dissenting climate scientists, a couple of TV magicians and a UK tory journalist aren't swaying me as much as the views of hundreds of presumably intelligent scientists.
Hemi said...[Okay then, 'climate change caused by human activities is a reality.']

You must be a sucker Hemi. There is climate change which is a fact. To assert that it is caused by human activities is naive and blindly following the consensus of the majority.

Hemi said...[And how many of the skeptics are funded by oil companies and large industry?]

I am a skeptic but I am not funded by anyone to debate on the subject.

Hemi said...[Consensus can change.]

Yes, exactly. On the scientific evidence that is well established ,it is human activities that cause global warming, then my opinion will change. At the moment, there is no direct evidence that it does exist. The only evidence they have now is computer models. It does not mean that Computer models are bullshit, but in doing large scale numerical simulations, the model have to be very consistent with observations. If the models stood up to the consistency of observations in agreement with simulations, then there is some indication that the model is somehow valid, but it does not mean it is the true representations of the physics of the climate process. There could be hidden variables that are not observables by humans but their indirect effect on other variables are measurable.

Hemi said...[Read the IPCC report. Read the dozens of articles published by scientists who study this stuff.]

I have read most of it, and I had to stop reading it because it is simplistic with the models covered there, which does make you think that the world's fate is determined by a first order differential equation.

Hemi said...[At either end of the physical size scale, cosmology and quantum physics are often based on assumptions that are worked and reworked as more investigation is done.]

Really? Why are you comparing climate change to established physics as Cosmology & Quantum Mechanics. Climate science is completely different to those core Physics disciplines. Alot of peer publications in 'Climate Science' are based on 'Inductive Inferences', where there is no Physics at all involved. Cosmology & Quantum Mechanics are deductive which they were formulated based on some known facts about reality that have shown to work on certain domain. Assumptions are then made about the unknown. Quantum Mechanics were not formulated out of the thin air. It was formulated based on 3 main principles in Newtonian Physics that were known to be true. So, Cosmology & Quantum Mechanics are generalisation of Newtonians. Climate change science is no generalisation at all, because if you compare some of those different models that have been published, there is some holes and also some contradictories. For example, there is a huge hole in 'Feedback of Coupling Climate Systems'. There is no model which can solve this highly non-linear scenario at the moment. Not even any of those organisations you have quoted above.

Hemi said...[Read the dozens of articles published by scientists who study this stuff.]

Yes, but some of those papers published by those scientists don't touch the difficult problems of 'Nonlinear Coupling Systems', and most of them don't even have a clue to what 'Nonlinear Coupling Systems' is. I will be keen Hemi if you can find out a scientist from those organisations you listed above who have formulated a complete 'Climate Coupling Systems' model which is available to look at somewhere.
Hemi, you countered my question "Why do so many politicians want to so much to insist upon a scientific consensus over global warming when that consensus just doesn't exist?" with the statement, "But it does."

The thing is that all those organisations you list do indeed insist that there is a consensus, but they achieve that by the simple expedient of branding all those with whom they disagree "climate change deniers." The recent modus operandi of the Royal Society is instructive to the methodology. See here and here.

If I may quote from Christopher Monkton's linked article, which you appear not have addressed:"Sir Nicholas Stern's report on the economics of climate change, which was published last week, says that the debate is over. It isn't. There are more greenhouse gases in the air than there were, so the world should warm a bit, but that's as far as the "consensus" goes."

In fact, there is not even consensus on how much the planet warmed last century (or what caused it), let alone by how much or by what means it might warm this coming century. As Monckton records: "In the US, where weather records have been more reliable than elsewhere, 20th-century temperature went up by only 0.3C. AccuWeather, a worldwide meteorological service, reckons world temperature rose by 0.45C. The US National Climate Data Centre says 0.5C. Any advance on 0.5? The UN went for 0.6C..."

"ALL TEN of the propositions listed below must be proven true if the climate-change "consensus" is to be proven true. The first article considers the first six of the listed propositions and draws the conclusions shown. The second article will consider the remaining four propositions.Proposition 1. That the debate is over and all credible climate scientists are agreed. Conclusion: False2. That temperature has risen above millennial variability and is exceptional. Conclusion: Very unlikely3. That changes in solar irradiance are an insignificant forcing mechanism. Conclusion: False4. That the last century’s increases in temperature are correctly measured. Conclusion: Unlikely5. That greenhouse-gas increase is the main forcing agent of temperature. Conclusion: Not proven6. That temperature will rise far enough to do more harm than good. Conclusion: Very unlikely7. That continuing greenhouse-gas emissions will be very harmful to life. Conclusion: Unlikely8. That proposed carbon-emission limits would make a definite difference. Conclusion: Very unlikely9. That the environmental benefits of remediation will be cost-effective. Conclusion: Very unlikely10. That taking precautions, just in case, would be the responsible course. Conclusion: False" If I may quote from Christopher Monkton's linked article, which you appear not have addressed:"Sir Nicholas Stern's report on the economics of climate change, which was published last week, says that the debate is over. It isn't.

Well, when I spoke of a "UK tory journalist" not swaying my opinion, that's who I meant. But regardless, I'm happy to admit the debate is still open. But again, if you look at the definition of "consensus", the consensus is currently with the Global Warming believers. And, again, if their opponents, the data and the reality starts to reflect something different from what they're proposing, then I'm sure they (as well as I) will change their tune.

Why are you comparing climate change to established physics as Cosmology & Quantum Mechanics.

I thought I had tried to make that clear. If you believe that we know all there is to know (ie. the 'reality') of quantum physics, and that the behaviour of sub-atomic particles is predictable, and similarly to the movement and behaviour of distant galaxies then I suppose my analogy is clearly flawed. I was just trying to point out that science is often based on data and assumption, as opposed to hard evidence and tangible 'reality'.

But we would appear to be at loggerheads. I will thus bid this discussion farewell...
Hemi,

Here is the most difficult part of climate modelling which was addressed in this workshop (see link below). What is not known yet (due to difficulty in the formulations of the climate model) is how coupling systems relate to other coupling sytems (or sub-systems), or how one climate sub-systems relate to other coupling sub-systems. Read carefully and then decide for yourself that the most difficulty part is not yet been solved. So, let the debate go on and don't shut it too soon, because scientists have not yet fully understood how climate coupling systems work. It is highly non-linear & very complex to model & solve. Until scientists have got some clear idea on how this most difficult problem work, then perhaps we hope that they are closer to finding the solution. But now, the consensus team has been pushed by the Green Peace, and the debate is not yet final.

"WORKSHOP ON CLIMATE SYSTEM FEEDBACKS"http://grp.giss.nasa.gov/reports/feedback.workshop.report.html
Hemi,

Here is a dynamical systems model of a "prey & predator". The "prey & predator" is a non-linear coupling systems which is known as 'Lotka-Voltera' equation. The domain is biological population control systems , but it is no different to dynamical systems in a climate systems. The systems is coupled because there are variables 'x' & 'y' appearing in both equations, which means if either 'x' or 'y' is perturbed (changed) then both equations are affected, and you call this a coupling systems.

Both the equations for predator & prey are first order differential equations, that is 'dx/dt' or 'dy/dt'. Also both equations contain a cross-term multiplications that is 'x*y' and this is what make this systems non-linear (cross-term).

In the workshop for feedback in climate systems that I posted in my previous message, it seemed that scientists are facing more complex dynamics than is simply shown by the 'predator-prey' model, because they were discussing a systems within systems (or sub-systems within sub-systems). God knows how many of these sub-systems within sub-systems they are trying to figure out. So, in terms of consensus, it is rubbish to say that the debate is final.

If you're interested to see how the "predator-prey" dynamical systems model (Lotka-Voltera) look like in its 'Block Diagrams' form, then take a look at this link below. The block diagram is at the bottom. The diagram is only for 2 equations (predator-prey), however, imagine how would a complete non-linear dynamical climate model is formulated which approximate the reality of nature? I bet that the feed-forward & feed-back of signal flow between variables are going to be much more complex for a climate model than the 2 variables of the 'predator-prey' dynamical systems.

"Lotka-Volterra (predator-prey) : Block Diagrams".http://www.mit.edu/~ghe/
Hemi, if "scienec" is based upon agreement instead of reality then it isn't science. The job of science to is recognise reality for what it is, not to agree. As for quantum physics it blatantly ignores reality, thus making it innaccurate. Only acknowledgng reality can lead to be accurate, not consensus and not ignoring reality, and not asumptions. As the authors of The Science of Discworld said, science needs reason (the recognition of reality) or else it fails.

As for us not knowing the reality of them that is rubbish. To the rational man reality is always knowable.

They are less reliable because they abide by the will of the politicians who fund them. Politicians will do what they percieve to be in their political interest not what is accurate. Also government funded ones have been proven by their privately funded ones to be less reliable.

Hemi, it is not getting hotter. According to reports 2005 was not the hottest year. 1998 was. That was 8 years ago. Besides warming occuring does not prove man caused it. We don't yet know enough about the planet's climate cycle to know if the planet is doing it to itself. Ther is no proof we are causing it.

As for rising sea levels, studies prove they are NOT rising at all.

Hemi, we cannot live in seperate realities. There is only 1 reality and we all live in it. The only difference lies in whether we choose to see it or not.

Hemi, just because so many endorse it doesn't make it true. If I wanted to play the numbers game I could point out that a even larger number disagree with that view. Instead I will stick with saying those ones are more reliable than your sources and provide better proof to their views. Such as: Antartica is actually gaining ice overall and Canada's polar bear population isn't shrinking (in fact 11 out of 13 are gorwing or stable).

The detractors include the incredibably intelligent and, more importantly, rational authors of The Science of DFiscworld, which are all scientists.

Also many scientists are finding natural causes for most of the "global warming things". For example a team of Russian scientists believe they have proved that water vapour affects the climate more than CO2. If natural causes are the reason we can do nothing about it and must simply go along for the ride.